is gearing up for major cuts to cooperation and development funds amid widespread protests by the country's non-governmental sector.
The government's budget for this year was approved just before Christmas and became effective at the beginning of this year. It reduces Italy's commitment to foreign aid by more than 55 percent, leading to a 20-year low in the country's cooperation effort.
For months, Italy's development sector has broadly criticized the drop in foreign aid funding, which now only amounts to 0.009 percent of the country's gross domestic product.
The Italian International Network Coordination- a group that includes NGOs such as ActionAid, Save the Children, Amref, Terre des Hommes, WWF and International Volunteer Service for Development - cautions that thousands of development projects are at risk, as well as Italy's commitment to the Millennium Development Goals.
The Italian Coalition Against Poverty, or GCAP, a coalition of more than 70 organizations, had sharply criticized the foreign ministry's plan to reduce development cooperation by some 170 million euros per year in a letter to Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, months before the Italian parliament approved the proposal. According to GCAP, the new government budget would lead to a total drop of 400 million euros in foreign aid, undermining Italy's credibility just as the country gears up to hosting the Group of Eight later this year.
Giangi Milesi, president of Italian NGO Cesvi, blasted the current government's first cuts to foreign aid, saying that the country had fallen from the top to the bottom of the list of European donor governments.
"The previous legislature had partly inverted a tendency to reduce foreign aid. But this government's financial cuts changed this back," Milesi said. "We started well, but we are now behind the other European countries. We are miles away from the GDP's 0.7 percent target, so we are worse than the rest of Europe."
According to Maurizio Carbone, who teaches politics at the University of Glasgow and authored an essay on European foreign aid and international development policies, a lack of public and political support of development cooperation in times of crisis may in part explain Italy's tendency to cut cooperation funds.
"When there is a crisis, cooperation policies are usually the first to be affected by cuts," Carbone said. "Almost nobody would protest against that, while cuts to education and health would ignite harsh polemics. This is why Italy also cut funds to cooperation in the early Nineties, when the country was trying to meet the Maastricht parameters and enter the Euro zone."
