Advocates, MEPs say EU's 2023 aid proposal falls short of need

Members of the European Parliament along with civil society groups are fighting to add €900 million ($898 million) to the European Union’s 2023 humanitarian aid budget, arguing the current proposal — which is below the amount for the previous year — is out of step with record needs around the world.

The European Commission, the bloc’s executive, presented its draft budget in June, with €1.6 billion allocated for humanitarian aid. That’s less than the roughly €2.2 billion under its 2022 budget — 95% of which had been committed by mid-July, according to a briefing the commission provided to MEPs this summer.

Barry Andrews, a centrist Irish MEP, tweeted a letter he wrote to the European Commission’s budget commissioner Johannes Hahn on Monday, calling for him to use his next proposal, expected imminently, to “substantially increase” the amount for humanitarian aid.

Andrews wrote that in June this year, 306 million people were in humanitarian need, up 66% since 2019.

“Since then, the covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine, the global energy crisis, inflation and climate shocks have exacerbated needs around the world,” Andrews noted, also referring to the recent floods in Pakistan.

Andrews, who chairs the cross-parliamentary SDG Alliance, also reminded Hahn of his remarks in June, when Hahn said that the full effects of the war in Ukraine were not yet known and that the commission’s updated 2023 budget proposal would “[target] our support, for example, humanitarian aid and support, or indeed by securing global security in terms of food security”.

“Now that the catastrophic global consequences of this war are better known,” Andrews wrote, “will you live up to your commitment?”

On Sept. 27, the parliament’s development committee called on the commission “to significantly increase humanitarian aid by at least €900 million to address the unprecedented gap between needs and available resources.”

The humanitarian aid NGO network VOICE is also calling for the commission to raise its initial proposal by €900 million to €2.5 billion. VOICE says this would at least maintain the 2022 figure, which VOICE expects will tally roughly €2.5 billion by the end of the period.

Should the commission not top up the amount for humanitarian aid with an additional €900 million, Andrews wrote to Hahn that “the European Commission will have to start cutting programmes. Your institution will be forced to choose between the lives you wish to save, and the others … We cannot stand for this.”

Tomas Tobe, the center-right Swede who chairs the development committee, similarly told Devex that “It is very concerning that humanitarian funding is not increasing at the same speed as the needs.”

“With multiple humanitarian emergencies around the world, it is imperative that the EU takes a leading role and works together with the international community to expand the donor base,” Tobe wrote in a message Monday. “The Commission needs to protect the funding originally allocated to development and humanitarian assistance in the NDICI regulation, despite the massive needs in Ukraine.”

The commission declined to comment.

Janez Lenarčič, the EU commissioner responsible for humanitarian aid, has been sounding the alarm about the growing financing gap between needs and available resources for years, launching a policy document on the topic in March 2021.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, Lenarcic vowed not to pull funds from the rest of the world to address the conflict on the EU’s border. But by June, Lenarcic told Bloomberg that EU member states needed to consider joint borrowing or a new fund to help the bloc — the world’s third-largest humanitarian aid donor behind the U.S. and Germany — meet growing humanitarian needs globally.

However, VOICE told Devex on Tuesday that even reopening the EU’s overarching 2021-27 budget would be insufficient to meet the current needs for this coming year as any revision would not happen in time to cover the 2023 allocation. Nor did VOICE advocate cutting development spending in order to meet humanitarian needs.

“Because an increase of the humanitarian budget should never come at the expense of development funding, VOICE urges the EU to find ways to increase the humanitarian budget for next year without reducing the development budget,” VOICE Director Maria Groenewald told Devex. Without saying which EU budget lines should be cut instead, Groenewald argued that “alternatives must be explored.”