| Welcome statement by Sir John R. Kaputin, Secretary-General, at the 3rd meeting of the ACP Ministers of Finance and Economic Affiars
Mr. Chairman, Honourable Dr. Thimothy THAHANE, Honourable Ministers, Commissioner for Economic Affairs of the African Union, Representatives of ACP Regional Integration Organisations, Distinguished Guests, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen; It is a great personal honour for me to welcome you all at the ACP House and to the third meeting of the ACP Ministers of Finance and Economic Affairs. I am grateful that you have accepted my invitation to come to Brussels, so that together we can advance our dialogue on how we can jointly map out a clear response strategy to leverage opportunities arising from our development cooperation arrangements and the various global initiatives. Mr. Chairman, As we reach the apex of our commemoration of the thirtieth year of the founding of the ACP Group, we realise that like other regional groupings in the developing world, the ACP Group faces great opportunities and challenges the balance of which does impact on the Group's medium term development prospects. The opportunities include the renewed effort by the donor community to scale-up their development support. Let me, in this regard, thank the European Union for its continued and growing collective partnership with our ACP Group of States. Our appreciation also goes to other development partners who continue to collectively or individually support the development effort in the ACP States and regions in many areas. Mr. Chairman, The European Union last year made a historic decision to double their development cooperation funding by the year 2010. Their decision included prioritising Africa's development in their external cooperation, also signified by a commitment to spend half of the additional development aid resources on Africa. This year the European Union is regrouping to agree on modalities for fulfilling these commitments. As a result of the noble commitment by the Member States of the European Union to double their development aid budgets by 2010 we can now, for the first time, witness a growing consensus for reaching the 0.7% development aid target as a proportion of the national income in the developed countries. We also witnessed the matching of the commitments of the European Union by the G-8 States with a decision to double aid resources and to cancel the outstanding external debts of countries eligible for debt relief under the HIPC Initiative. Mr. Chairman, The world leaders at the United Nations Summit in September last year, though they did not agree on new pledges of partnerships as was the case in Monterrey and Johannesburg, they did however reaffirm both the doubling of development aid resources and cancellation of the external debts of the HIPCs. The Boards of Directors of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the African Development Bank subsequently reaffirmed the debt cancellation decision. These initiatives and commitments, when fully implemented, would benefit the majority of our States. The ACP Group should, therefore, capitalize on these developments and shore up its comparative advantage to attract and absorb the ultimate increase in resource flows arising from these initiatives. Mr. Chairman, On the other side of the global geopolitics we are witnessing a protracted rise in the prices of oil. For a few of our membership that are bestowed with these highly valued natural resources, the current windfall revenue gains presents enormous opportunities to aggressively tackle the MDG challenge and to create conditions for sustainable development. We would very much encourage them to take full advantage of these grand opportunities. Yet, for most of the ACP countries that are net oil importers, the new price levels for oil will pose medium- to long- term economic difficulties, and possibly erode some of the attained socio-economic gains. Mr. Chairman, As I mentioned to the Senior Officials earlier this week, on the bilateral front, the successful revision of the Cotonou Partnership Agreement provides us with the opportunity to strengthen the ACP-EU development cooperation in many areas. After protracted negotiations on the financial perspectives, the Summit of the European Union in December agreed on a larger 10th EDF for the ACP countries for the period 2008-2013. The 10th EDF is broadly in line with the European Union's global commitments to double its development aid by 2010, though falling short of the estimated financing requirements for the ACP States to achieve the MDGs by 2015. The European Union has also demonstrated its resolve to redefine its development cooperation strategies with the ACP Group. In this pursuit, the European Union has recently developed separate cooperation strategies for Africa and the Caribbean, and is currently designing a cooperation strategy for the Pacific. These are in addition to the Cotonou Partnership Agreement that was revised just a year ago. Mr. Chairman, It is evident that the EU Strategy for Africa lays down avenues to forge a Euro-African Pact to accelerate Africa's development. The strategy is a Cotonou-Plus, both in regional coverage and content of cooperation, and is broadly in line with our collective support for the initiatives of the European Union and those of the international community to prioritize Africa's development. The recently released development cooperation strategy for the Caribbean covers less but specific areas of focus, thus meeting the stated objectives of concentrating development aid. However, the strategy attempts to shift the balance of wider regional integration in the direction of Latin and Central American countries. Mr. Chairman, Let me point out that there is a growing consensus within the Group that the development strategy documents at hand pose serious questions on the medium- to long- term implications of these regional initiatives to the broader ACP-EU cooperation. Though one would be inclined to encourage the build-up of parallel partnerships as part of the global trend, the ACP Group should be mindful that these new regional development initiatives are not primarily advanced at a great cost of degrading our largest North-South Partnership. On trade cooperation, the current negotiations of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) that are targeted to replace the non-reciprocal trade cooperation in January 2008 possibly will remain the immediate and greatest challenge in our bilateral cooperation with the European Union. The rhetoric here is that the EPAs will be instruments for development. However, the experience of the ACP regions that had early on offensively pursued negotiations on development and regional integration subjects reveals that their two-year effort generated no tangible results on these areas of great interest to all ACP States and regions. Mr. Chairman, The noted developments on the EPAs are a source of great concern especially at this late stage in the EPA negotiations. The fear is that as negotiations advance to areas of offensive interest to the European Union, namely market access, the development dimension of EPAs will suffer as a result of the European Union's potential aggressive ambitions on the market access pillar. Mr. Chairman, We consider these issues to be critical in leveraging our bilateral and wider development cooperation, present and future. The Senior Officials in their discussions over the last three days have also confirmed our initial assessment that these issues are of critical importance. Therefore, we have put them at the core of the business of your meeting. In fostering the dialogue with our development partners on these issues, we have scheduled a joint session with the Commissioner for Trade and other Senior Officials of the European Commission later today. Likewise, we have also scheduled a joint session with Representatives of the International Financial Institutions tomorrow morning. Mr. Chairman, Distinguished Delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen; Allow me to conclude my statement with a proposition that the balance in the opportunities and challenges we face calls for even greater concerted efforts to take a new look at the future of our bilateral and broader development cooperation arrangements and how these should propel our countries to a better positioning in the global economic space. As I also mentioned to the Senior Officials earlier this week, at the Secretariat we are reorganizing to better rise to these opportunities and other challenges. We have set up a new Department responsible for Development Finance and Intra-ACP Programming. The new department, though still quite small in terms of staff complement, will enable the Secretariat to better respond to issues related to the ACP-EU development finance cooperation and those at the global level that are of critical relevance to the development of our countries. Honourable Ministers and Distinguished Guests, I welcome you again at the ACP House. And, I do thank you for your kind attention. |
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