Eurostep Weekly 479

Eurostep weekly

Scant heed to women’s rights in EU aid plans, Eurostep finds
Programmes focused on reducing women’s poverty are largely absent from a new series of EU aid plans for countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP), a Eurostep analysis has found.

The EU institutions are currently assessing the strategy papers that will guide how nearly €23 billion is spent in the ACP from the beginning of next year until 2013.

After contacting the European Commission’s offices in the 77 ACP states qualifying for aid, Eurostep has only been able to identify two cases where funding has been allocated to support women-specific issues.

Eurostep believes that poverty will not be eradicated unless inequalities between men and women are addressed. About 70 percent of all victims of poverty are female, with women usually earning less (even for the same work) and controlling fewer resources than men and frequently excluded from political decision-making on issues that affect them and their families directly.

The lack of focus on gender in the aid plans is inconsistent with the Commission’s stated policy of ensuring that women’s needs and rights are addressed by a two-pronged approach. The first component of this approach is that gender issues have to be taken into account in all areas of policy through a process known as ‘mainstreaming’. The second is that mainstreaming must be combined with programmes specifically tailored towards empowering women.

Fight against poverty mustn’t be subordinate to security, says MEP
Peacekeeping missions in Africa must not be financed at the expense of development aid, a new European Parliament report says.

In 2003, the EU established a €250 million African Peace Facility which has subsequently been used to support peace-keeping operations in Sudan’s war-ravaged province of Darfur.

The money from this facility has been drawn from the European Development Fund. This is despite how rules drawn up by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development on what constitutes development aid preclude it from being spent on the military.

A parliamentary report drafted by Dutch Christian Democrat MEP Maria Martens argues that while the Peace Facility “needs to be strengthened”, this cannot be done in a way that flouts the OECD’s criteria.

“Development policy is one of several tools for addressing the root causes of insecurity but it should not be subordinated to security policy,” she said.

Martens’ report assesses the state of play in EU-Africa relations since the Union published a strategy for Africa in 2005.

Her report accuses EU officials of preparing that strategy without any meaningful consultation with African governments or anti-poverty campaigners.

It also expresses serious concern that use of some €2.7 billion from the European Development Fund for 2008-13 will be dictated by how African countries are rated by EU officials according to a set of ‘governance’ indicators. These indicators have been prepared “without any participatory element”, Martens said, and their use could run counter to African initiatives on improving governance such as a 2002 agreement in Durban, South Africa, that the continent’s governments should undertake ‘peer reviews’ of each other’s performance on such matters as cracking down on corruption.

EU tries to dictate terms of trade between poor countries, claims Caribbean negotiator
Caribbean governments have alleged that the European Union is trying to prevent them from signing trade deals with other poor countries on their own terms.

The European Commission, is hoping to secure a series of Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with 76 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries by the end of this year.

While the Caribbean has signalled its willingness to accept the 31 December deadline, its negotiator with the EU, Jamaican official Junior Lodge last week voiced dissatisfaction with a number of proposals made by the Union.

Under the EPA proposals it has put forward, the Commission seeks that any trade concession which the Caribbean grants to a country enjoying more than a 1 percent share of world merchandise exports – such as China, Turkey, India and Brazil - must be automatically conferred on the EU, too.

Lodge said that this provision could prevent it from liberalising its rum trade with India and Brazil, without applying the same measures to Europe, also a rum supplier.

He claimed that the EU’s stance on this matter is being driven by its so-called Global Europe policy. Unveiled last year, this commits the EU to removing any obstacles encountered by western firms wishing to do business abroad, including measures designed to shield domestic firms in poor countries.

“We are violently opposed to this,” Lodge said.

The latest state of play with the EPA negotiations was discussed by the joint parliamentary assembly of EU and ACP states, when it met in Brussels on September 12-13.

Sources:
www.ipsnews.net
www.europarl.europa.eu

Michel denies saying sorry to Sudan
Louis Michel, the European commissioner for development, has denied that he issued an apology to the Sudanese government so that an EU official facing expulsion could remain in Khartoum.

Kent Degerfelt, the European Commission’s envoy to Khartoum, was recently told to leave Sudan after its government accused the EU of meddling in internal affairs. Khartoum was angered by how the Commission had urged it to release jailed opposition figures accused of plotting a coup.

The foreign ministry in Khartoum had stated that it agreed to allow Degerfelt remain in the country until his term expires at the end of September because Michel had apologised to it.

But Michel told the European Parliament’s development committee last week that “at no point did I offer any excuses or bend the knee”.

Sources:
www.europeanvoice.com
www.europarl.europa.eu

Mandelson in fresh bid to restrict poor’s access to medicines
For the second time this year, the European Commission has called on Thailand not to systematically circumvent drug patents in order to boost the supply of affordable medicines to the poor.

Since last year, the Thai government has issued compulsory licenses to ensure that it can import generic versions of three patented drugs, the price of which would otherwise be prohibitive. Two of the medicines are used for treating AIDS, the other for heart disease.

Peter Mandelson, the European commissioner for trade, has urged Thailand not to use compulsory licensing on all medicines it deems too costly. Last week (10 September), he wrote to Krikkrai Jirapeet, the Thai minister for commerce, arguing that compulsory licensing “should not become the standard way of doing business because systematic recourse to compulsory licensing would eventually be detrimental to the patent system and thus to innovation and the development of new medicines.”

Mandelson had previously irritated MEPs by making a similar plea to Thailand in July.

The European Parliament’s international trade committee decided on 12 September to delay approval of a World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement on patents for medicines until it receives a formal commitment from EU governments that the Commission will be prevented from taking action that hinders access to medicines in poor countries.

The WTO agreement is designed to allow poor countries lacking production capacity to address public health emergencies by importing cheap generic versions of patented drugs produced under a compulsory licence.

However, MEPs have argued that the accord has proven too cumbersome to bring any benefits to the poor. They have demanded that the EU become more strident in demanding that cheap treatments for major diseases are made available to developing countries at low cost.

Sources:
www.msf.org
www.europarl.europa.eu
www.ip-watch.ch

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