Euro-Med: ensuring a fair deal

This briefing note evaluates the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (Euro-Med), a partnership agreement between the European Union (EU) and its ten southern Mediterranean partner countries ten years after it has come into existence. The note argues that while the Barcelona Declaration of the Euro-Med Partnership promised to create 'an area of shared prosperity', there have been few concrete benefits for poor people living in southern Mediterranean countries over the past decade, and poverty in the Middle East and North Africa has increased in the last 15 years.

The note highlights that:

• the governments of the partner countries and the EU should tackle the issue of poverty and make deliverable commitments to ‘creating an area of shared prosperity'
• reciprocal trade relations cannot be achieved while poor farmers bear the burden of inequalities created by the EU’s subsidies and domestic structural constraints
• fighting poverty in Europe’s neighbouring countries will also further European security and political interests
• rural development will ease migration pressure from rural areas to the cities within the partner countries, and from the partner countries to the EU
• a healthy social and economic environment is essential for stable political development in the partner countries.