Aid groups lash out at Solana plan to streamline Councils

By David Cronin

JAVIER Solana has unveiled plans for a slimmed-down Council of Ministers as part of radical reforms to make the European Union less complex and bureaucratic.

At present EU government ministers meet in 16 separate configurations of the institution, ranging from trade to transport, according to their national portfolios.

Solana, secretary-general of the Council of Ministers, wants to reduce the number of areas covered to 10 by scrapping some and merging others.

He has sent a paper outlining his plans to member state capitals.

Both he and the Spanish presidency are hoping a deal can be clinched on streamlining the institution's work at the forthcoming summit of EU leaders in Seville (20-21 June).

Solana's proposals would, for instance, involve merging the council for finance and economics (Ecofin) with the one for budgets; fisheries would become part of the agriculture council; environment would come under health; and industry would be grouped with research.

However, the most controversial aspect of his proposals is that the council for overseas development should be subsumed by the general affairs council, which comprises the foreign ministers from the 15 member states.

Anti-poverty activists, who first learned of this idea last weekend, have already started mobilising against it.

They believe it would form part of a trend under which the EU is continuously allowing its focus to shift away from the world's poorest countries.

A report by British Overseas NGOs for Development (BOND), published on Tuesday (28 May), laments how the EU is gradually giving more to its 'near abroad' in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean than to Africa, Asia and Latin America. The proportion of EU aid targeting low-income countries fell from 70% in 1990 to 39% in 2000, it states.

Dutch aid analyst Mirjam van Reisen, who wrote the report, said the Solana idea is "smelling of vulgarity".

There is a danger that development advocates will "look like an orchestra on the Titanic, playing vigorously while the ship sinks", she added.

Helen O'Connell, head of policy with UK-based One World Action, said: "For the EU to be taken seriously as a global player, it needs a stronger voice on international development.

"The proposal to abolish the development council would put it further at the bottom of the external relations agenda."

An EU official said the Solana suggestion would probably be resisted by many of the Union's development ministers, who meet in Brussels today (30 May).

He predicted, though, that their colleagues holding the foreign affairs portfolio could back it and that this could prove decisive.

There was speculation earlier this week that Solana would discuss his plan with development ministers over lunch.

But a spokesman for the Spaniard yesterday confirmed he would be away on a diplomatic mission to the Middle East.

Solana had previously presented a paper on making the conduct of EU affairs more efficient to the Barcelona summit in March.

Among his recommendations then were that the duration of the Union's rotating presidency should be extended from six months to two-and-a-half years.

European Voice - Volume 8 Number 21 - 30 May 2002