An overview of EC aid

The European Union as a whole is the world’s largest donor, providing 60 per cent of all global development assistance – over 84 billion USD in 2008. The European Commission is in charge of managing the European Community’s (EC) development assistance, also called EC aid. Taken alone, the European Community ranks as the third largest donor in the world - after the US and Germany - accounting for 10 per cent of aid assistance.

EC aid, which amounts to over 13 billion Euro annually, is divided and managed through regional and thematic programmes with the aim of achieving specific EC objectives. One particularly important example is the Forest Programme, which supports interventions to promote the conservation and sustainable use of forests in developing countries.

Despite the importance of the EC aid programme, the quality of its aid programme is, even by its own account¹ is poor and needs to be improved. Much has improved on paper since FERN’s work in this area started in 1995 when concerns included that the EC aid programme did not integrate civil society concerns and that forests and forest peoples’ rights were neglected. There were also few links made with regards to the way that environmental degradation leads to an increase of poverty. There is a long way to go regarding implementation,² but EC policy have developed greatly and include now a variety of tools to ensure environmental and social concerns are picked up during the development and implementation of EC aid programmes and projects.

One of the other key issues is that aid, particularly in relation to forests, is often linked to European Community trade agreements. This can be seen in such policies as the Cotonou Agreement - which sets out the legal basis for aid and trade cooperation with the 77 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries that have signed up to it; in the Community’s proposal for voluntary cooperation agreements under the EU FLEGT (Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade) Action Plan; and the revised regulation of the General System of Preferences that includes environmental criteria for tropical forest products. Linking forest-aid to trade raises real concerns as forests should not be considered simply a source of timber that can be used as a bargaining chip as they also play important ecological, social and spiritual functions.