MINYA: As 13 European ambassadors filed off their bus here on Sunday they were greeted by a burst of music. A troupe of local farmers, equipped with horns and drums, had gathered to welcome them to a field on the edge of this Upper Egyptian town, where the European Union funds a program aimed at improving crop yields and quality. The Poverty Alleviation in Rural Communities Project, as it is called, is one example of a host of programs the EU sponsors in the Minya governorate, where nearly 40 percent of people are poor, according to United Nations statistics. On Sunday, the delegation arrived to see what their governments' money has bought. Their tour included visits to a girls' school, a farming cooperative, a village's renunciation of female circumcision and a look at a "mobile human rights unit - essentially a van that registers citizens' complaints - in action. Following the first day of the ambassadors' tour, Klaus Ebermann, head of the Delegation of the European Commission in Egypt, sat with Daily News Egypt to discuss the tour as well as Europe's broader role here. Daily News Egypt: Was there anything that surprised you during the visit today? Klaus Ebermann: They were pretty well prepared for the first part of our visit today, which was the agricultural project. This didn't really surprise me as such - what surprised me was the scale of this operation now. We heard that quite a few thousands of farmers are now involved in the scheme. So what I saw as a fairly small development unfolding just over two years ago has now become a much broader and rather successful development. The farmers whom I saw two years ago were just starting to look at marketing - they never had that experience before. They were growing products, but they didn't know who would buy them, and when, and at which quality. All this has moved on. They have become much more systematic and professional in their approach. I found this quite interesting because this was essentially local people by themselves, [developing techniques so as] not to spoil the soil, to be organic in their production, but then also using what you would call the cooperative approach in Europe, where they share machinery, pool the marketing and commercial requirements. Also, I was not disappointed to have again seen quite a number of ladies speaking up. I've seen that before as well. They take the lead in making their points. And I think this is quite a good experience. Is the cooperative model for farmers that you mentioned based on anything used in Europe? I have begun to learn over the years that the very notion of cooperatives seems to often bring back memories of the previous forms of government in Egypt. The socialist model of cooperatives - very much drawn from East Germany, by the way - is not what we have in mind. What we have in mind is rural communities creating a kind of organization where they share equipment, where they share knowledge, and where they share marketing facilities. What happened here was not by decree from a ministry or by government design, but by local initiative. There happens to have been investors, there have been people who were also prepared to provide training, there was a bit of seed money from us and the UNDP (United Nations Development Program) and others, and that did the trick. That's it. They have found a way to be more efficient, more effective, more productive. Why are there so many European Commission projects in Minya? We follow opportunities either given to us through the government - because we have to work from government to government essentially - [or through] umbrella organizations, such as the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood and the National Council for Human Rights, as a platform from which you have a trickle of grassroots NGOs feeding the system. It so happens that there is a fairly strong basis [for this] here in Minya. But you know we have ?1 billion of programs ongoing here in Egypt, with big fish such as basic education, such as water sector reform management, such as health sector reform. So in terms of funding the NGO and micro-credits and that sort of thing, it is not very important. But in terms of effective impact it can be very important. There is no specific bias we see for Minya as the NGO paradise, none at all. It's just the reflex of things we have done and are doing in the governorate. Tomorrow you will not see any NGOs on our program, it is girl-friendly schools, it is FGM (female genital mutilation) and a bit of culture. So it's a more complete picture. A number of organizations you fund are Coptic. Has this caused any problems here, where sectarian strife was a problem last year? First of all there is no bias in our programs. It so happens that this is a Coptic organization that we saw today (the Coptic Evangelical Organization for Social Services), and there are others as well. I was quite anxious to establish from the outset that this Coptic organization - at least nobody has told me the opposite - has no bias and caters for farmers whatever their religion may be. With many European countries now in recession, do you think the economic crisis will affect these sorts of programs? They will not be affected at all in the meaning I suspect you have given your question. We stick to our commitments, [and] there will be no programs scaled down. We have pledged cooperation money with Egypt up to 2010 in the order of ?564 million - this figure doesn't change. We have a midterm review this year where we will perhaps change our location of funding, but there will be no change in the figure. We have already started the preparation for the next medium term financial envelope, which will be in the same range. So there will be continuity, there is no question about this. Where I do see an impact on the work of such projects is in the social consequences we all risk as fallout of the economic crisis. Let's take Egypt which has a fairly comfortable position compared to many other countries. You need to create about 700,000 to 750,000 jobs every year because of your rapidly growing population. To create so many new jobs, you have to have economic growth in the range of about 6 to 6.5 percent. You are down to about four now, and you might even drop further to, I don't know, 3.5, or your guess is as good as mine. Unemployment, youth unemployment, social tension and strife, this obviously could have an impact on such programs, because they could just become a drop in the ocean - or in the Nile.
