Development Ministers of the G7, a group of the world’s most advanced economies, ended their talks here in Paris yesterday with a consensus that the approach to development, including how countries like Barbados access financial and other support, needs to change.
This was outlined by France’s Minister Delegate for Francophonie, International Partnerships and French Nationals Abroad, Éléonore Caroit, and reinforced in a communique issued at the end of the two-day G7 Ministerial Meeting On Development, which was hosted by the government of France.
With a significant number of countries grappling with rising debt and poverty levels, food insecurity and humanitarian needs, ministers from France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and United States assembled at the Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs to address these and other global development challenges.
One of the issues on the table was reform of the criteria which determined the countries that can benefit from official development assistance (ODA). Barbados is excluded from such support.
ODA support is allocated using the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and includes gross national income per capital measurements provided by the World Bank.
“We had the OECD participating . . . and that was very important, because they are undertaking a reform of the DAC as we speak. It was important first to show the support of the G7 countries representing 70 per cent of the financing of development as part of the discussion, to show the support and the importance of ODA, but also the importance of taking into account other parameters and other metrics,” Caroit said during a press conference yesterday.
“There were really interesting discussions amongst the World Bank, for instance, and other development banks, to show platforms that already exist and other instruments that are already ready to use, so to speak, and sometimes
used in some circumstances, and how we can generalise these approaches.
“It really was to show that we support an ambitious reform of the DAC system, but it was not intended to pre-empt the reform that, of course, should take place within the DAC framework.”
She noted that “different members of the G7 have different views on ODA, but there was an agreement that this has been a very important tool that has been used to measure development, and that has been the core of our policies for decades.
“And so the idea is not to replace ODA or to eliminate it, but to accompany the DAC reform that is already intending to open its perception of how we can assess development policies in countries and where they should stand,” she added.
Caroit also said she was happy development ministers from the G7 were able to find consensus.
“I believe also it is important to speak about development nowadays. The backlash against some of the development policies and actions is present in every country. This has become, to a certain extent, a very ideological field, and what we did during these two days in Paris is to show that there is consensus beyond any form of ideology, that there is a willingness to work together to address the needs of those that need it the most.” (SC)
