EU RESPONSE:EU DEVELOPMENT ministers have agreed a €412 million package to assist in the relief effort in Haiti after a meeting at which they heard of "apocalyptic" scenes unfolding in the country after last week's earthquake.
With EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton set to discuss the response to the disaster with the US and UN authorities this week, the ministers said a co-ordinated global response was required to avoid repeating mistakes made after the Asian tsunami in 2004, when some of the aid sent did not reach its target.
“We need to pull it together, do it at the right time, and make sure it is about supporting Haiti for the medium and the long term,” Baroness Ashton told reporters.
She was speaking after an extraordinary summit in Brussels at which ministers signed off on a package of immediate and long-term pledges for humanitarian and non-humanitarian work.
In a separate development, European Council president Herman Van Rompuy said he had decided to take up the situation at the highest political level and to bring it up at an informal summit of EU leaders on February 11th.
“Reconstruction efforts and EU support for the proposed international conference for Haiti will be part of our discussion,” he said.
The relief effort in Haiti stands as the first test of the new EU foreign policy systems introduced when the Lisbon Treaty was enacted last month.
The creation of the job held by Baroness Ashton, who is simultaneously a vice-president of the European Commission and a member of the council of ministers, was designed to provide greater coherence to such work.
The financial package EU ministers agreed yesterday comprises €30 million in humanitarian assistance from the European Commission and a further €92 million from the union’s 27 member states, €2 million of it from Ireland.
The Government’s contribution includes €1 million to the UN’s “flash appeal” and €1 million to Irish charities: Concern, Goal, Trócaire and the Red Cross.
The Government is separately making another €20 million available to the UN emergency response fund, Minister of State for Development Peter Power told reporters in Brussels.
The Government has hired a 747 jumbo jet to bring an 84-tonne consignment of emergency aid to Haiti. Scheduled to leave tomorrow, the consignment includes shelters for use in tented towns outside Port-au-Prince, mosquito nets and enough items of “basic infrastructure” to help some 8,000 families.
Early non-humanitarian assistance from various EU funds and programmes, focusing mainly on the restoration of government capabilities in Haiti, will reach €100 million. Ministers will discuss the contributions of individual member states at a further meeting next Monday.
According to the ministers’ statement, a further €200 million will be made available from similar sources to finance the longer-term response.
However, Mr Power said it was not possible to say whether the ultimate sum required to rebuild Haiti was twice the €412 million agreed yesterday or a figure approaching €1.5 billion.
Mr Power said his French counterpart, Alain Joyandet, told the meeting about his visit to Haiti at the weekend and had spoken of an apocalyptic scenario in the country. “There’s a general consensus that such is the scale and scope of this disaster that it requires a global response by global players,” Mr Power said.
The three organisations which needed to push together in the initiative were the US, the UN and the EU, he said.
While EU members may send some 150 armed policemen to assist in keeping the peace and protecting aid workers, Mr Power said the Government had taken no decision to participate in that effort. “We haven’t considered that yet.”