Here are some best practices and policy approaches for Parliamentarians in the North to consider aimed at promoting the right policies to achieve the Millennium Goals:

1 Parliaments need to make the Millennium Development Goals part of their debates and scrutinize their government’s Goal 8 policies. For there to be any meaningful progress on the Millennium Goals in the North, parliamentarians must have open and frank dialogue on development issues. In some countries, these issues are not even part of current agendas. Parliamentarians need to scrutinize their government’s Goal 8 positions on an on-going basis to ensure that they are in line with what their government signed in the Millennium Declaration and Goals. These debates should extend beyond the issue of aid volume and also address aid quality, trade and other related issues. National Millennium Goals Campaigns in some OECD countries have galvanized political action. In Italy, for example, a member of the Italian parliament drafted a resolution, just prior to Cancun, that endorsed the Millennium Goals and insisted that no new trade agreement should be signed if it were not fully consistent with the Goals. The resolution was subsequently signed by 92 Italian MPs. An Italian Parliamentary Working Group on the Millennium Goals was established to help ensure that the Goals are central to parliamentary debates. This working group will promote a comprehensive and coherent Italian development policy fully aligned with the Millennium Goals, by organizing a series of MDGs debates and hearings, and by sharing best practices across OECD countries in order to help draft the new law on development cooperation.

2 Parliaments need to monitor their country’s commitments to increase aid volume. It is absolutely critical for parliaments in the EU to monitor their country’s commitments to increase the volume of aid. Member states agreed several decades ago to work towards 0.7% ODA/GDP over time, but it is only at Monterrey that they recommitted themselves to increase ODA to the EU’s average of 0.39% GDP by 2006 with a concrete, time-bound framework for individual member states presently below the average. Five European countries (Denmark, Luxembourg, Sweden, Norway and Netherlands) have already surpassed the 0.7% commitment to 0.8-1%. Five others committed to achieve the 0.7% by a concrete deadline (Ireland by 2007, Belgium by 2010, France and Spain by 2012, and the UK by 2013). But it will be important for these countries to set credible, intermediate annual targets to increase ODA. Other EU member states committed to achieve at least 0.33% in 2006, as a step towards achieving the 0.7% (Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain). But political action here is lagging and to credibly achieve the 033% by 2006, these countries will need to increase their ODA budgets substantially in the meantime. It would be helpful if those five countries that have already surpassed 0.7%, together with those five countries who have committed to 0.7% by a specific deadline, would pressure the ‘laggards’ to adopt deadlines for 0.7%—well in advance of 2015.

a) Parliamentarians should encourage the ECOFIN and General Affairs and External Relations (GAER) Council of Ministers to monitor annually progress on their government’s Barcelona and Monterrey pledges. The forthcoming Luxembourg Presidency has a unique credibility and opportunity to create peer pressure in relevant Councils, including ECOFIN to follow through on these promises. The problem is that those countries that need to achieve 0.33% in 2006, are some of the same countries that have problems increasing public expenditures, given the stability pact. It would help if the ECOFIN decided that expenditures on ODA above the EU average would not be counted in terms of the criteria of the stability pact.

b) Parliaments should aim for agreements across party lines. Such agreements help to ensure that governments are bound to follow through on promises—no matter who is in office. In Ireland, an agreement was reached in parliament across party lines to achieve the 0.7% ODA target by 2007—so whoever wins future elections—the government will be committed to follow through. Similar cross party agreements are or were in place in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands.

c) Parliaments should encourage the EU to raise the bar on ODA pledges. The European Union will easily surpass their target of 0.39% by 2006, as several member states since Barcelona, committed more than their originally agreed ODA target (e.g. France and the U.K.). But these increases should not let taxpayers in countries that are falling behind on ODA pledges off the hook from delivering on their own promises. Thus, the EU should raise the bar by setting a more ambitious average percentage of ODA/GNP in the coming decade, starting with 2006.

3 Parliaments need to monitor their country’s commitments to increase aid quality. It is as important for parliamentarians to discuss the issue of aid volume, as it is to discuss the issue of delivering high-quality and more effective aid. The OECD DAC Peer Reviews that monitor individual donor countries’ policies and efforts in the area of development co-operation provide high-quality assessment of development policies on a country-by-country basis (approximately every four years per country). These Reviews offer a goldmine of information and recommendations on how your government can perform better. Until now, these Reports are only debated in some parliamentarian forums, but I encourage Parliaments in every donor country to reflect on and debate the recommendations in these reports. Too much bilateral aid has been driven by strategic geo-political objectives to countries that do not need external concessional assistance to reach the Goals. Aid is provided in ways that benefit the donors’ exporters and visibility rather than contribute to reducing poverty. It is no surprise that public opinion is sceptical of aid effectiveness. The Millennium Goals have been helpful for governments in many Northern countries to link aid flows to achievement of the Goals, strengthening the pro-aid constituency by changing the image of ODA from giveaways that support corrupt regimes to concrete programs that can, for example, reduce child mortality or provide primary education. To increase aid effectiveness, political debate in parliaments should focus on:

a) The need for aid to target poor countries (particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa) that most need external concessional resources to achieve the Millennium Goals, and on those sectors and delivery mechanisms that enables ODA to do so.

b) The need for aid to respect national ownership of developing countries and support home-grown strategies; and the need for donors to understand that it is not donors that develop countries, but countries that develop themselves.

c) The need for individual member states to end the practice of tying aid that reduces its effectiveness by 25%, according to World Bank estimates. Tied aid is financially costly for recipients, limits options in maximizing use of resources, invites corruption, and leads to the most onerous procedures. Aid should finance local and recurrent costs including financing budget support. Achieving the MDGs, particularly in health and education, requires cash to finance salaries of teachers and nurses, and basic medical and school supplies, among other needs. The European Commission has ruled that tying procurement to individual member states is inconsistent with the directives on the internal market and competition in the European Union. Now is the moment for the EU to untie aid among its member states and to table the issue at OECD DAC in order to agree on OECD-wide untying.

d) The need to encourage governments to adopt action plans for implementing the Rome Declaration on Harmonization aimed at streamlining institutional policies and procedures to improve the effectiveness of development assistance, and ensuring that these action plans are in place in time for the 2nd High Level Forum on Harmonization and Alignment of Aid Effectiveness (Paris, March 2005). The Development Committee Communiqué (October 2004) states: “The international community has agreed to harmonize and align their support behind country-owned development strategies, streamline the use of conditionality, increase the focus on results, and use country systems where appropriate. We are committed to using the Second High-Level Forum on harmonization in Paris next spring to translate these agreements into clear and specific commitments and timetables and call for the development of indicators and benchmarks to monitor the participation of all partners in this effort at the country level.”

4 Parliaments should encourage governments to deliver on the Doha promises. The practice in WTO is to negotiate quid pro quo commitments, however the promise of Doha means that, as the UK trade minister states in white paper to British Parliament: “International trade policy should support the economic development of poorer countries, through policies appropriate to their needs. We should not expect poorer countries to pay a ‘price’ for any ‘concession’ on subsidies, tariffs or market opening by a developed country, as trade negotiators too often imply. . .” To make governments live up to their promises made in the Doha Round, I encourage parliamentarians to address the following issues:

a) Parliaments should encourage governments to open their markets to developing counties. Despite significant liberalization in recent decades, trade barriers are still high—especially on labor-intensive goods and services in which developing countries have a comparative advantage. Poor country exports are locked out by high tariffs (concentrated on agricultural products, textiles and clothing), by tariff escalation (whereby the tariff increases the moment a commodity is processed) and by non-trade barriers. Barriers on products from developing countries are twice as high as those on developed country products. Reducing tariff peaks on products that are of export interest to poor countries will be essential for them to trade their way out of poverty. Furthermore, even when ‘preferential’ market access privileges are available, rules of origin make it extremely difficult for poor country exports to profit from them. Giving LDCs free market access under Everything But Arms, for example, has delivered very little and this and other agreements need to be evaluated to ensure they are made more effective by simplifying and relaxing the rules of origin.

b) Encourage governments to reform agriculture policies. Three-quarters of the world’s poor—900 million people—live in rural areas and depend on agriculture or related activities. Rich countries—the EU is among the worst offenders—grant large support to their domestic agricultural producers, totalling $300 billion annually. These subsidies lead to worldwide overproduction that effectively depresses world prices, floods poor country markets and undermines incentives and earning opportunities for farmers in developing communities. Agriculture policies in OECD countries cost consumers and taxpayers $300 billion every year—five times annual OECD spending on ODA. To my delight, I saw that the UK Trade Minister announced the need to have a deadline to put an end to agriculture subsidies that distort poor countries markets. It would be wonderful if committees in all European parliaments would further promote this idea.

c) Encourage government to stop pushing EPAs until the Doha Development Round is concluded. Poor and small developing countries have limited negotiating capacity in the trade arena and it should be their priority to develop their own markets by regional integration (i.e. Sub-Saharan Africa countries in the African Union). Thus, the EU should consider not pushing EPAs until the Doha Development Round is concluded. Furthermore, these Agreements seem inconsistent with promises of the Commissioner that the G90 countries would not be forced into new disciplines. Developing countries perceive EPAs as a vehicle for the EU to require reciprocity and reintroduce disciplines on investment and competition that have been explicitly excluded from the Doha Round last summer.