The 16th ACP EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly 2008

The Port Moresby declaration that was adopted by the Parliamentary assembly deals with the global food and financial crises. The calls made in the declaration are (as enlisted by the ACP EU website):



1. Calls on the EU institutions to speedily adopt and implement the recently-agreed €1 billion Food Facility proposal without corresponding cuts in bilateral aid budgets in order to respond to urgent needs in developing countries with substantial additional aid.



2. Calls on ACP and EU governments to respond to the urgent needs of the most vulnerable - particularly women and children - by enhancing nutrition interventions and safety nets and expanding social protection systems.



3. Stresses that high demand and speculation pushed up food and fuel prices; notes that volatile food prices particularly affect the most vulnerable groups, such as children, women, the urban poor, the rural landless, pastoralists, small-scale farmers and a multitude of people affected by or recovering from shocks and conflict, such as internally displaced persons and refugees; notes that although world food prices have fallen recently, cereals, rice and oilseeds prices are forecast to be 10% to 35% higher over the next ten years than in the past decade; notes that soaring fuel prices hit developing world farmers particularly hard by forcing up fertiliser and transportation costs, especially in landlocked countries.



4. Recalls that Millennium Development Goal 1 aims to cut the proportion of people who suffer from hunger by half but nearly a billion people go hungry every day, despite the fact that the world produces enough food to feed its entire population.



5. Stresses that developing countries, many of them net food importers, are the biggest victims of volatile food prices and that there is a need to push food production back up the international agenda.



6. Calls on ACP-EU governments jointly to ensure that sufficient aid and public spending is channelled towards achieving food security, as stated in the Maputo Declaration by AU Heads of State and Government in June 2004.



7. Calls on ACP and EU governments to increase investment to achieve 2% growth per year in agriculture, rebuild staple food stocks - which are at all-time lows - and strengthen global monitoring and information systems.



8. Calls on wealthy nations, including EU Member States, as well as the incoming US Administration, to reduce agricultural subsidies and eliminate agricultural export subsidies as most rich countries promised to do at the outset of the Doha Development Round, although since then, globally there has not been much progress.



9. Calls on ACP governments to involve farmers and pastoralists, many of whom are women, when elaborating their agriculture and land-use policies.



10. Calls on ACP governments to empower smallholders farmers, especially women, by ensuring their access to the land, credit and new technologies that will increase production.



11. Calls on the European Commission and the EU Member States to improve coherence between agricultural, trade and development policies.



12. Calls on the international community to regulate the global financial system to guarantee transparency and discourage unethical speculation and reform it to ensure developing nations have a greater say.



13. Calls on EU Member States to reduce the effects of the global economic slowdown on developing countries' growth, trade and foreign direct investment flows by helping to strengthen further their trading capacity and improve their infrastructure and facilitating remittances.



14. Calls further on EU Member States to honour their commitments in regards to the Official Development Assistance - i.e. 0.56% of Gross National Income by 2010 and 0.7% by 2015 - and not to use the financial crisis to justify aid cutbacks, especially when billions of Euros have been mobilised in an extremely short space of time in response to the global financial crisis while the international community appears to have far greater difficulty providing fresh funds to fight hunger and poverty.



15. Calls on EU and ACP states to take action to eradicate tax havens, tax evasion and illicit capital flight from developing countries, which cost these countries some €800 billion a year, in other words, eight times what they receive in aid.



16. Calls on ACP and EU Heads of State to use the UN "Financing for Development" summit in Doha from 29 November to 2 December 2008 to secure real progress on defining new approaches to financing more equitable global development.



17. Calls on the G20 to respect the commitments made at its Washington Summit on 15 November 2008.



18. Calls on all stakeholders to work together to secure a successful, sustainable and timely conclusion to the Doha Development Round.



These calls seek to be a roadmap towards alleviating large populations in the world from the burden of the ongoing food and financial crises. To know more about the 16th ACP EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly, please visit www.pngacpeu.com.