2004: June 25 : OECD Countries and Civil Society Organisations exchange views on export credits issues.

Representatives from Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) met in Paris on 25 June with OECD Members to exchange views on issues relating to the work undertaken at the OECD  by the  Working Party on  Export Credits and Credit Guarantees (ECG) and the Participants to the  Export Credit Arrangement.  The meeting was chaired by Mike ROBERTS, Deputy Permanent Representative of Australia to the OECD and Vice-Chairman of the Participants to the Arrangement and the ECG. The OECD Deputy-Secretary General, Herwig SCHLOGL, welcomed the CSOs to this seventh annual consultations meeting and emphasised that the OECD export credit work was rated as highly important by its Members.

The CSOs included representatives from the two OECD consultative bodies, the Business and Industry Advisory Committee (BIAC) and the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC), and from several NGOs including les Amis de la Terre, Urgewald, ECA-Watch Network, Environmental Defence, FERN, Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, Friends of the Earth Japan, Africa Network for Environment and Economic Justice (ANEEJ), Projecto Gato, the Corner House, WEED and Transparency International.

The participants to this outreach meeting focused their debates on::

• The latest version of the Arrangement on Officially Supported Export Credits, which has been in force since early 2004; some CSOs requested that the issue of renewable energy be discussed among the export credit rule-makers in the context of providing more generous terms and conditions for such projects.
• The implementation of the OECD Recommendation on Environment and Officially Supported Export Credits adopted in December 2003, which sets out the guidelines to be implemented by OECD Members giving their support to a project that is likely to impact on the environment.  On this issue, several CSOs pointed at different levels of implementation of the Recommendation; other CSOs stressed the need to limit the burden of environmentally-related procedures for business and industry.
• An update on the implementation of the 2000 Action Statement on Bribery, which invites ECG Members to adopt and implement the necessary measures in their export credits schemes to combat bribery, and which contributes to the anti-bribery efforts undertaken  by OECD Member countries through the OECD Recommendations and Convention on Bribery in International Business Transactions.  The representative of Transparency International called for further meaningful measures to be implemented through export credit procedures as a complement to other anti-bribery measures already in place.
• The implementation of the 2001 Statement of Principles on Unproductive Expenditure adopted to discourage the provision of officially supported export credits for such expenditures in Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs) in support the World Bank HIPC Debt initiative.  Some CSOs called for an extension of these Principles in the direction of other countries in addition to the HIPCs.

Some CSOs called for more frequent consultations with the OECD export credit bodies, over and above the annual consultation to which the ECG is committed, and the Chairman advised that their request would be put to those bodies at their Autumn plenary meetings and that he would also report fully the deliberations of this meeting.

OECD Secretariat
28 June2004