PRESS BRIEFING BY EUROPEAN UNION

Press Briefing

PRESS BRIEFING BY EUROPEAN UNION

The General Assembly's special session to review the implementation of the Agenda 21 recommendations of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio had led to progress on some issues, such as forest management on which a legally binding instrument could be approved, the Minister for Development Cooperation of the Netherlands, Johannes Peiter Pronk, said on behalf of the European Union, at a Headquarters press conference on Friday evening to discuss the end of the review session.

He said negotiations on such other environmental issues as climate change were continuing, with the European Union optimistic that they might lead to an agreement that would serve as the basis for the third Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, to take place in Kyoto in December. Negotiations on water conservation and on alternative sources of energy also deserved attention.

"I think the review conference was no failure, but it was not a big success", he said. "It could have been bigger."

The Minister expressed sadness that the special session's outcome on financing for sustainable development was not more concrete than it could have been. The European Union and other donors had been ready to commit to an undertaking to reverse the drop in official development assistance (ODA) by the year 2000. But the developing countries, the intended beneficiaries of the enterprise, had not accepted the language proposed by the Union to put the undertaking into effect.

Another main feature of the concluding special session was that agreements had been delayed by the greater incidence of cultural, conceptual and ideological confrontation than at Rio de Janeiro five years ago, he said.

A major lesson from the special session, he continued, was that the structure of review conferences should be changed to prevent renegotiations of commitments made at global conferences. Such attempts would be doomed to failure about 90 per cent of the time, pulling down with them the review conferences themselves. The risks of taking big steps backwards were very high. If the review conferences scheduled for the Cairo, Copenhagen and Beijing Conferences witnessed attempts to renegotiate agreements, they could lead to retrogressive steps away from the commitments made at those global conferences.

In response to a question as to why the undertaking to reverse ODA reductions was shot down, Mr. Pronk said it was jeopardized by its rejection by the developing countries, who stood to gain the most from it. That was surprising because his biggest fear at the beginning of the session was that those countries would mainly focus of criticizing their richer counterparts

for not meeting their ODA targets, a course of action that would have been justified. After efforts of persuasion by the Netherlands, the European Union and other donors agreed to reverse the slide in ODA before the end of the twentieth century -- in two short years. The undertaking, with reservations expressed by the United States, would have increased funds for sustainable development in a new approach that included five measures. The first would have sought to prevent a renegotiation of the targets set at the Rio Summit. The second would have reversed the decline in ODA by the year 2000. The third would have called for the use of aid for poverty eradication, against desertification and for water management. The fourth measure would have stressed that aid could be used as a catalyst to generate investments from domestic or foreign sources. Finally, it would have stressed the importance of domestic policies.

The undertaking was a balanced proposal which took account of the views of the industrialized and the developing countries, he said. Surprisingly, the "Group of 77" developing countries rejected the proposal and settled, instead, for an appeal for more financial resources. He did not know why they turned down a proposal that had been particularly tailored for Africa's needs. However, he said, he had noted that African delegations, with the exception of that of the United Republic of Tanzania, were not very much in attendance when the undertaking was rejected. Those present were mainly Group of 77 members from eastern Asia, which were not particularly interest in ODA.

Asked whether the entire donor community had supported the undertaking, he said most donor countries did, with the exception of Japan which expressed reservations about the deadline for reversing the negative trends. He said he was still puzzled by the rejection of the undertaking by the developing countries. "If the developing countries are not interested, we won't do that twice", he said.

Responding to a question as to what would stop the European Union from implementing the undertaking on its own, Minister Pronk said the Union had taken three factors into consideration. First, the undertaking should be seen as relevant to its beneficiaries, otherwise it would be difficult to persuade taxpayers to increase what they paid for ODA. Second, other donor countries should be included since the undertaking should not be a solely European issue. Finally, non-traditional donors, who had gained from recent international economic developments, should be asked to join the donor club's efforts to reverse the fall in ODA rates.

Asked whether the developing countries' rejection of the undertaking could have signified their distrust of the donors, he said that, while such a reason was possible, it was unjustifiable. The lack of trust would have more to do with politics than with the ODA track records of various European Union countries, some of which, like the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, had increased their assistance.

European Union Briefing - 3 - 27 June 1997

Asked to propose ways to improve review conferences, the Minister said that, first, previous commitments should not be renegotiated. Secondly, the reviews should serve particular functions. The first function would be to transparently register the records of various States in implementing Agenda 21. Secondly, they should provide forums for explanations by States of their policies. Thirdly, reviews should compare the best practices of policies in, for instance, forest management and desertification in order to help countries multiply their options and to allow them to help each other. Fourth and finally, rather than attempting to kill new ideas, consensus should be sought on new policy proposals, such as the aviation fuel tax, which should at least be studied or tried. The limits of the previous global conferences should be moved forward, rather than narrowed or shrunk.

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