What Belgium’s EU Council presidency should focus on: report

Belgium should use its upcoming Council Presidency to focus on policy coherence for key areas such as development, trade, and migration, according to the 2023 Belgian development cooperation report published by CNCD-11.11.11 – an NGO – which was presented to the press on Thursday.

The report underlines that, despite a slight increase, Belgian development aid is stagnating over the long term.

Belgium is below its neighbours, with 0.45% of its Gross National Income (GNI) allocated to development (0.4% in 2021). For example, France gives 0.56% of its GNI, Germany 0.83%, and the Netherlands 0.67%. Luxembourg has outstanding results in this respect since it allocates 1% of its GNI to development aid, while the UN target is 0.7%.

As an indicator, the EU countries donors’ average is 0.57%.

To achieve the 0.7% target – to which the government committed in its agreement -, Belgium would need to spend approximately €1 billion more, according to the NGO, which thus calls on the government to substantially increase the development cooperation budget from 2024 onwards.

However, the report appreciates that Belgian aid is more focused on the least developed countries (LDCs) than most donor countries while noting it is still below the international target of 0.15% of GNI, at 0.14%.

Phantom aid

While 2022 seems a record-breaking year for Official Development Assistance (ODA) worldwide – $204.0 billion according to the OECD – the NGO warns that it is mostly because most donor countries included refugee reception costs and aid in the context of the war in Ukraine in development aid. Meanwhile, aid to Sub-Saharan Africa was reduced by 8% between 2021-2022.

Excluding these “in-donor” refugee costs, ODA still rose but less sharply.

The association pointed to the problem of “phantom aid”, which never reaches people who need it in poor countries.

For example, Belgium (apart from Flanders) has decided not to count aid to Ukrainian refugees arriving on its territory in the overall development assistance amount. However, countries like Poland and the Czech Republic did.

In the Czech Republic, if aid to refugees had not been considered, the refugee costs as a portion of ODA would have been negative, the NGO head of research Antoinette van Haute said.

However, 12% of Belgium’s aid is still phantom aid. As a comparison, Luxembourg completely got rid of phantom aid, she underlined.

Council Presidency

Apart from increasing the budget for development, the NGO has asked Belgium to promote a number of issues at EU level when it will hold the Council presidency as of January.

Among the issues, it noted the policy coherence for development, which is enshrined in EU treaties and is an SDG, and to which EU member states have committed. However, in case of failure to respect this principle, there is no sanction.

Belgium performs particularly badly in this regard, the NGO notes. According to the Spillover Index, which assesses the actions countries take and their spillovers on other countries’ abilities to achieve the SDGs, Belgium ranks 160/166.

To reduce spillovers, it is necessary to take policies as a whole, as an agriculture or migration decision can impact development, for example.

According to the NGO, Belgium must also push for the adoption of a model trade agreement that includes a binding chapter on sustainable development, backed up by sanctions, as well as for the adoption of ambitious EU legislation on corporate due diligence.

On migration, Belgium should propose a Pact for Migration and Asylum that promotes migratory justice.

“The logic of outsourcing migration policy to developing countries, which was defended a few years ago by Viktor Orban alone, is now being defended by a growing number of governments”, Arnaud Zacharie, Secretary General of the CNCD, deplored.

The outsourcing of migratory influx regulation causes legal and geopolitical concerns, he explained. These agreements do not respect the right to asylum enshrined in the Geneva Convention – and sometimes even human rights – and place the EU in a vulnerable geopolitical position. Indeed, agreements concluded with authoritarian regimes place the EU under the thumb of these regimes.

This has been seen in particular with Turkey, with Erdogan threatening to open its borders for migrants to enter the EU in order to put pressure on the EU.

He also criticised the Polish and Hungarian blocking of the fair distribution mechanism for migrants proposed by the EU Commission, which is necessary.

The CNCD wants to establish legal and safe channels for migration in order to curb the migratory crisis and eliminate illegal immigration and is also calling for a reform of Frontex, which has been criticised for human rights violations.

State Secretary for Asylum and Migration Nicole de Moor has also been advocating for an approach that involves cooperation covering migration and other topics to create a better life for people in migrants’ countries, notably via education or employment in order to prevent them from fleeing in the first place.

(Anne-Sophie Gayet | Euractiv.com)