Marie-Arlette Carlotti, on behalf of the PSE Group. – (FR) Mr President, Mr Winkler, with regard to the cooperation between the Union and the ACP countries, several sums have been put on the table: firstly by the Commission, then, in December 2005, by the Council and, in the space of a few weeks, nearly EUR 2.5 billion have disappeared. I want to believe that we are concerned here only with a gross miscalculation.

Fortunately, the Commission has recently made some new proposals, on 17 March, which are marked by two significant advances: firstly, an additional package of almost EUR 1 billion for the tenth EDF, which is designed to take care of the administrative costs and, secondly, an additional package of almost EUR 300 million for the OCTs, which would thus be re-integrated into the EDF as, I might add, they are requesting. I believe that these Commission proposals are along the right lines and represent a first step on the road indicated by Parliament. The fact remains that these proposals are in the hands of the Council from now on and that it is its responsibility to try and come up with something better. It is in fact the word of the European Union and its commitment in the fight against poverty that are at stake.

The word of the Union means the one that is included in Annex 1 to the revised Cotonou Agreement. Admittedly, the wording was deliberately ambiguous since it was a matter of gaining the agreement of our ACP partners on some political points that were disputed and, I might add, disputable. It was not ambiguous, however, to the point of explaining the fanciful calculations of the Council. Let us not make our African partners believe that Europe’s new motto is: ‘promises only bind those who believe in them’.

Promises were in fact made in 2005. Thus, at the European Council in June, the Union and the Member States committed themselves to increasing their official development aid on a regular basis until 2015. At the G8 Summit in July, the European Union also committed itself, together with the other donors, to doubling official aid for Africa by 2010. Will we be able to keep those promises given the shrinking budget proposed by the Council for the tenth EDF? The answer is ‘no’, and the Council cannot claim otherwise.

As for the management and payment procedures for this tenth EDF, I also have cause for concern, but explanations are needed as much from the Council as from the Commission. It is a question, firstly, of the funding of the ‘development’ dimension in the economic partnership agreements currently under negotiation and, secondly, of the new performance criteria set by the Commission in the working document of 13 January for the allocation of EDF funds, criteria that would be added to the traditional ‘needs’ criterion.

I should like to conclude by saying a few words about the budgetisation of the EDF. This Parliament has expressed its support for the budgetisation on several occasions, since it is a question of the democratic control of the budget allocation. I believe that we could include the EDF in the budget while respecting our ACP partners because we need to get away from the intergovernmental practices that give rise to bargaining, with the kind of outcome for the EDF that we saw at the Council in December. Admittedly, this is not the issue that we are concerned with today – everything in its own time – but it should not, for all that, be forgotten about.