Brussels defends development aid link to migration

NGOs fear budget plans will take focus away from fighting poverty.

The EU’s top aid official has defended his budget plans from charities who fear money meant to help low-income countries fight poverty will instead be used to help European politicians curb migration.

Neven Mimica, the European commissioner for international cooperation and development, said that tackling the causes of migration fits well with the EU’s overall development policy.

In an interview with POLITICO, he also stressed that fighting poverty would remain at the heart of EU development policy.

The 64-year-old Social Democrat from Croatia is one of the Commission’s most-travelled members. While other commissioners involved in foreign relations have a higher public profile, Mimica has made a name for himself in the development community as someone who is particularly active on issues of gender equality.

“Poverty eradication is now, and will be in the future, the core priority, the core focus of the European development actions and development engagements abroad,” Mimica said.

The EU is a major player in the development aid world. If its development spending is combined with that of its member countries, it’s the world’s biggest aid donor — to the tune of €75.5 billion in 2016. On their own, EU institutions are the world’s fourth biggest aid donor, behind the U.S., Germany and the U.K.

As part of its proposal for the EU’s next long-term budget, running from 2021 until 2027, the Commission plans to merge 12 existing funding streams into one — the €89.2 billion Neighborhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument.

Funds will be heavily focused on regions that include countries of origin or transit countries for migrants heading to Europe. Sub-Saharan Africa will be allocated €32 billion, for example, and Asia and the Pacific merely €10 billion.

In its proposal, the Commission says that 10 percent of the new instrument is to be dedicated to “addressing the root causes of irregular migration and forced displacement and to supporting migration management.”

Mimica said it is wrong to see tackling migration as incompatible with development work.

“I’m a bit worried that there is an ongoing perception that a migration agenda is not a development agenda,” he said.

“Poverty eradication for us is the glue that keeps the migration agenda and development agenda so close together,” he said, adding that migration and development aid should be seen as “complementary.”

‘Root causes’

“There is a prevailing understanding in the European Union that the best way to tackle the migration agenda outside Europe … is to tackle the root causes of migration by development tools,” the commissioner said, noting that the root cause of migration is poverty.

But development NGOs say that aid should not be used to limit people’s horizons and is not suited to that purpose.

“Development cooperation can help tackle the root causes of forced displacement, but it’s not a tool that can or should stop people from moving,” said Florian Oel, a spokesperson for Oxfam. “Evidence shows that development leads to more migration, not less — and economic growth often relies on migration.”

Civil society organizations are also concerned that a focus on migration diverts aid from regions in dire need.

“Just look at Niger, where the EU Trust Fund for Africa channels aid money to a part of the country where migrants are passing (Agadez), rather than to where a humanitarian crisis is happening (Lake Chad Basin),” Oel said.

Critics also point out that despite the Commission’s assurances about the purpose of development policy, the current EU budget proposal does not list eradicating poverty among its goals.

“If poverty eradication is truly meant to be the core of the new external instrument, it remains astonishing that it is not mentioned in the objectives, despite other aims being there,” said Jonathan Beger, director of EU advocacy at World Vision and EU budget expert for CONCORD, a coalition of NGOs.

For many NGOs, a key worry is what happens to development aid if a Commission with a more Euroskeptic bent takes office next year. As a result, they are pushing to make the EU budget’s legal text a safeguard for priorities such as gender equality, poverty eradication and the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals.

“Verbal assurances are not enough,” Save the Children said in a statement emailed to POLITICO. “The Commission needs to spell out on paper that poverty eradication remains at the heart of the EU’s development cooperation efforts.”