Ahead of an international conference on helping the developing world, European Union Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid Karel De Gucht spoke to AlertNet from a taxi on his way to an airport and answered as many of AlertNet readers' questions as he could.

You can read an article from the interview here.

For answers to questions that do not appear in the article, please see below.

AlertNet (AN): Do you expect the European Union will improve the situation for refugees in host countries where they do not enjoy the right to work and most are detained in camps without the freedom of movement?

Karel De Gucht (KDG): I don't think that the purpose of our immigration policy should be to have people in camps... I know what the problem is, especially in the south of Europe, but the idea would certainly not be that we keep people in camps. Either we have to let them in, to give them papers or we should send them back to the countries of origin, but I would certainly voice strongly against having permanent camps for refugees at the borders of Europe. I think this would be a very, very bad idea.

AN: But it does happen because it takes so long to sort out the papers.

KDG: From a previous occupation [De Gucht was Belgium's Minister for Foreign Affairs between 2004 and 2009] I know what immigration policy means. It is very, very difficult. It is a never-ending story. Every measure we are taking also has very concrete impact on, let's say, the scene. When you alleviate your policy, the result is that more immigrants come because there are hundreds of millions of people who certainly would like to end up in Europe, but it's simply not feasible for Europe, so it is very complicated.

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AN: How does the European Commission make sure the development aid it provides is spent on the intended projects? How does it make sure the money does not end up in corrupt officials' pockets or funding an undemocratic leader?

KDG: We have a proper monitoring system for development aid. The European Commission is spending its aid directly on projects and infrastructure but also for the larger part, through international organisations, mainly U.N. organisations, and we are trying to make sure that no money is disappearing in the pockets of whoever. What we are actually doing, what we are working on is a report on aid effectiveness. Let me cite you an example: in 2008, there were 600 missions to Tanzania with respect to the public health sector, 600 missions on a yearly basis. This is crazy. So what we try to do is to see how we can make our aid more effective in terms of focusing on specific sectors, on specific countries...

I think this is really crucial that one should not mix up aid effectiveness with fraud, that's quite something different. So I think we have to combat fraud...and we are trying to make sure that this is not happening, but we are not living in an ideal world, it will never be. And on the other hand, we also want to work on aid effectiveness. We have been figuring out that if aid were really more effective, we (the European Union) could save up to 7 billion euros ($10 billion) on a yearly basis. Practically, this means that we would be able to spend 7 billion euros more because you would not save them to put them in your pockets... I have advanced that in the ministerial meeting in November on development aid this should be discussed and that we should really take political decisions within a short period of time on how we are going to put this into practice because we have to do it together with member-states. ...The European Commission and member-states of the European Union all together, they make up for 60 percent of all aid on the worldwide basis. So if you can make this more effective, it really could have a very huge impact.

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AN: It is expected that soon climate change will cause the prices of food and water to increase to prohibitive levels and that this problem will not improve at least in the next 50 years because even if we manage to reduce global emissions, we will not reverse climate change but only reduce its speed. If future food prices begin to hit developed nations who rely on imported food, do you expect that these developed nations will begin to cut international aid in order to feed their own populations?

KDG: You are asking me to give a judgement on what European member-states will do within 10 years, that's not very easy. What I think is that we have a responsibility to the developing world to help them cope with climate change because...climate change is a result of the industrial revolution, so we should help them. And also I think we have a common interest. To give an example of that, a lot of countries are importing food from the developing world - this obviously will have an impact on prices and then, you already see that last year, for example, we had the food crisis and we could encounter that again in the future, so we have to work together to avoid that.

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