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The survey was carried out in 27 Turkish provinces between March 2 and 26, 2022 by means of face-to-face interviews, with 2,180 respondents representing Turkeys adult population.

Turkey-EU relations have been marked by political crises. As a result, Turkeys EU accession process has more or less been put on the back burner. However, since the tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean began to decline in Autumn 2020, several high-level dialogue meetings have taken place between the two sides and relations have started to ease. Nevertheless, establishing a stable relationship and a positive agenda has yet to be achieved.

Similarly, after years of tension between the United States and Turkey, the relationship has struck a more positive tone over the last year, particularly since the United States' withdrawal from Afghanistan. While high level political dialogue is still lacking, there has been close dialogue on bureaucratic level.

While not one of the key drivers, public opinion has increasingly become an important factor impacting foreign policy in democratic countries. The field study of this years survey was conducted during Russias invasion of Ukraine, making the results even more interesting.

Within this framework, we hope that this survey will provide a valuable resource for policymakers, media, think tanks, and academics who are searching for ways to put the EU-Turkey or EU-Western relationship back on track.

See more here:
Turkish Perceptions of the European Union 2022 | Strengthening Transatlantic Cooperation - German Marshall Fund

As the war in Ukraine continues, households across the world are feeling the heat with prices of common food items like wheat, vegetable oils and sugar soaring.

According to the the Black Sea Region is a global breadbasket and Russia and Ukraineaccount for 29% of global wheat exports, 19% of maize exports and 78% of sunflower oil exports.

Yet the war has disruptedfood production and further inflated food prices. Russia has bannedgrain exports and Ukraine's harvest is uncertain.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) highlightedthat the global food price index hit an all time high in March this year,the highest since the FAO's establishment in 1990.

Food Price Indices in the EU

Within the European Union, the price of food, alcohol and tobaccoroseby 4.1% in February after a 3.5% increase in January.

"It's important to remember that the real threat to food security is in poor countries, particularly in countries very dependent on imports from Ukraine, like in the Middle East and North Africa," explainedAriel Brunner, farming expert withBirdLife Europe and Central Asia, an organization focussing on nature conservation.

"In Europe, it's more of an inflation issue," he told DW.

"Cereals, sunflower oil and a handful of other commodities will probably experience a supply shock. But it's important to understand that this is about the near future,"he said.

The EU has been a key trading partner of different agri-food products withboth Russia and Ukraine.

According to a report by the European Parliament, before the warthe EU sent 3.7% of its overall exports in agri-foodsto the Russian Federation and about 1.4% of it's imports came from Russia. While EU agri-food exports included soya beans, cocoa beans, oilseeds and honey, imports from Russia included oilseeds, wheat, feed ingredients and fertilizers for farming.

Meanwhile, Ukraine accounted for 36% of imports of cereals to the European Union and 16% of oilseeds. In turn, the EU exported more than 3 billion euros of agri-food products to Ukraine in 2021.

The price of vegetable oil has increased since Russia's invasion of Ukraine

Yet according to theEuropean Commission, the bloc can easily weather the instability caused by the war in Ukraine.

"The EU is largely self-sufficient for food, with a massive agri-food surplus, and the EU single market can once again be expected to prove its ability to absorb shocks," the commission saidin a statement. It published a report in early April, which includes measures to help EU farmers to increase domestic production of grains like wheat, maize and oilseeds.

Sommer Ackerman, a young farmer and climate activist currently based in Finland, also told DW that the EU does not need to fear food shortages due to the war.

"The EU is a net exporter of agri-food products. However, Putin's attack on Ukraine has led to inflation in food production prices. This also includes energy prices which are impacting the fuels needed to make and export food and agricultural products,"she said.

The Commission hadpreviously already warned that high input costs might continue to drive up food prices, hitting the EU's poorest communities.

Ackerman stressed that food security outside the EU was alsobeing impacted. "There are some countries in NorthAfrica that heavily rely on imports from Russia and Ukraine for their food security. The EU needs to redirect food supply to these regions as well," she said.

The war in Russia has also increased the price of fertilizers, making food supply costs even more expensive and angering farmers in many European countries.

Farmers in Greece and France have already held demonstrations demanding the EU should support them in tackling thehigh fertilizer costs, which many fear will impact food production.

While the European Commission has announced that farmers will receive more EU subsidies to handle the rising fuel and fertilizer costs,Pekka Pesonen, the Secretary General of European farm lobby groupCopa-Cogeca, told DW, "we have already seen that before the war, there was a huge increase in the prices of fertilizers, energy and cost of labor."

He added that these "additional higher costs have been very difficult to explain to the other parts of the value chain: the processing industry and retailers."

Birdlife's Ariel Brunner arguesthat while it is clear that farmers are struggling, this war has also exposed the problems of thecurrent farming system in the EU.

"The heavy dependence on fossil fuels is becoming an obvious problem and some farmers are now also starting to realize that they should be less reliant on artificial nitrogen fertilizers and use more agro ecological practices. It also shows the vulnerability of hyper specialization, where so many farmers have moved from mixed farming to only growing one type of product,"he told DW.

"It's very clear that a lot of our farming system has been driven into a corner where the farmers are extremely vulnerable, whether it is by these sort of geopolitical upheavals or indeed climate change, which remains the big real threat for food production."

Ukranian farmers are uncertain about yields from the upcoming harvest season due to the war.

Given that food security in European Union is not at risk, the bloc is in fact keen on tackling global food shortages far beyond its own borders.

The European Commissioner for Crisis ManagementJanez Lenarcic saidthat"rising food prices are putting the most vulnerable people across the globe in an even worse situation. Russias invasion of Ukraine increases the pressure on food systems and threatens millions worldwide with hunger. We are now at a turning point and urgent action is required."

He saidthe EU together with the UN would work to tackle food insecurity and provide humanitarian aid to vulnerable regions.

Last week, members of the European Parliament also called on the EU to increase its domestic productionand support countries outside of Europe facing food shortages because of the war.

Grocery bills increase in the EU due to the war in Ukraine

For Copa-Cogeca's Pesonen, the EU needs to learn from the past and become more resilient.

Speakingfrom his hometown in Finland, he explained how Europe had dealt with food shortages in the past.

About 100 years ago, Finland was part of Imperial Russia. And then due to the political difficulties and the revolutionary wars in Russia, our borders were closed. That meant that, especially in the south of the country, we actually had a lack of food," he told DW.

That experience has triggered a political willingness to ensure EU member states are actually working on what they call a preparedness plan, where in any kind of crisis, whether political, military or even natural, we must ensure that the population is well fed and we have stable supplies."

Original post:
As global food prices soar, will the EU face food shortages? - DW (English)

Britain will have enough gas to meet demand, and will even ship additional gas to Europe due to low storage levels there.

When underground storage facilities begin to fill up ahead of winter, National Grid expects gas exports to the EU to increasefrom April to September.

Interconnectors allow Britain to export gas to Europe, and National Grid forecasts UK average shipments to Europe to reach 5.4 billion cubic metres this summer, up from 0.7 billion cubic metres last summer.

This summer, liquefied natural gas (LNG) will be more crucial than ever, according to the grid operator. It anticipates LNG supply to average 6.4 billion cubic metres this summer, up from 5.1 billion cubic metres last year.

The United Kingdom imports only about 3% of its gas from Russia, while the European Union imports nearly all of itswhile the European Union relies on Russia for around 40% of its needs. Several European countries have said they are reducing reliance on Russian gas in the wake of the war in Ukraine.

Read this article:
United Kingdom plans to increase gas supply to the European Union - BOL News

President Biden recently announced the creation of a Task Force on Energy and Security with the European Union as a show of commitment to reducing Europes dependency on Russian energy. The plan is to increase liquified natural gas (LNG) exports to Europe by 15 billion cubic meters this year.

This sounds great in theory. But its hard not to wonder, how will the United States help Europe lessen their reliance on Russia for energy, when our president is pushing the same Green New Deal policies that got Europe there in the first place?

In the European Unions rush to go green, they prematurely abandoned fossil fuel production for less reliable forms of clean energy, such as wind and solar. Weather-dependent renewables were subsidized as these countries went all-in on eliminating fossil fuels from their energy portfolio.

Europe shut down coal and nuclear plants as part of their plan to reach carbon neutrality as quickly as possible. For example, Germany shut down three of its last six nuclear reactors even though nuclear energy is the only carbon neutral base-load power source and plans to close the final three by the end of 2022. France, Germany, and Bulgaria banned fracking, and France and Spain blocked LNG terminals which would allow them to import U.S. natural gas.

One pandemic and a windless summer later, Europes supply of always-on energy decreased while the demand for energy stayed the same. Wholesale gas prices rose by more than 400 percent since the start of 2021, over 20 energy suppliers in Britain went bankrupt, inventory stockpiles ran short, and many countries had to pay a 90 percent surge in carbon emission fines to revamp fossil fuel production. It was an energy crisis.

This rush to green made Europe reliant on corrupt foreign oil cartels to keep the lights on and fill the gap in their energy needs. Russia supplied 40 percent of Europes natural gas and 25 percent of their crude oil supply. This is more than double the amount of natural gas imports Europe was receiving from Norway. For Germany, they relied on Russia for 50 percent of their natural gas. Gazprom is still sending Russian oil to Europe currently.

This crisis should serve as a cautionary tale to President Biden and the Democratic Party that eliminating reliable energy here at home puts our country at the mercy of our adversaries and cripples our ability to help our allies.

President Biden began his assault on American energy when he cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline and rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement on his first day in office. He went on to diminish the federal leasing program into operating at a bare minimum. He slowed down the processing of applications for permits to drill on public lands and in U.S. waters and pledged to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

The Biden Environmental Protection Agency is pushing methane regulation on oil and gas and the Security and Exchange Commission is ruling that publicly traded companies must disclose their financial risk from climate change to support this effort.

Now, the Biden administration is propping up renewable energy to make it look more attractive than fossil fuels. He approved the nations first major offshore wind farm and is pushing for more development plans along the coastline. In the proposed Build Back Better legislation, the Democrats offered $300 billion in tax incentives to weatherize homes and create electric vehicle charging stations.

Sound familiar? President Biden cannot push the same policies as Europe and expect a different outcome. Thats the definition of insanity.

What has happened in Europe proved to the entire world that renewables cannot be the only source of energy. The war in Ukraine showed us they are also not safe.

Germany has recently begun accelerating the development of two new LNG terminals to reduce dependence on Russia gas imports and is considering revamping their abandoned coal mines. Unfortunately, they cant reverse course fast enough. Years worth of infrastructure, development, and innovation have already been thrown away.

To best support our allies, America must be energy independent. We can only achieve that with an all-of-the-above energy portfolio, which includes both renewables and fossil fuels. In the time President Biden has spent crippling the industry and pointing fingers, our producers could have been providing the world with the energy they need. American energy independence is critical for global stabilization and through their rush to green, Democrats are putting that in jeopardy.

Markwayne Mullin represents Oklahomas 2nd District and is a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

See the article here:
Europes rush to green: A cautionary tale for America - The Hill

Faced with hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving in EU countries in 2015, policymakers from member states felt the pressure to show aquick reaction. Convening with the leaders of several African countries in the Maltese capital, Valletta, they decided to fill a pot of money. This money was not dedicated to helping integrate the thousands of people who had arrived in the European Union. Instead, the so-called EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF) was supposed to "address the root causes of irregular migration" so that fewer Africans might try to make their often dangerous way to Europe.

Was this goal reached six years and 5 billion later? Together with partner newsrooms within the European Data Journalism Network, DW is taking stock of the EUTF. More than 250 projects were initiated through to the official end of the project assignment phase in December 2021, and many of them are still up and running, with the peak disbursement of EUTF funds in summer 2020. With the Neighbourhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument (NDICI) already set up as the next tool and with 8 billion ($9 billion) likely to be allocated to the migration management efforts it is worth looking at the data available.

The EUTF had several objectives that had been presented as equal in the initial documents: Addressing the root causes of irregular migration, preventing and fighting smuggling and trafficking, strengthening protection for people fleeing their homes, improving cooperation on return and reintegration, and advancing the possibilities for legal migration.

The money was not allocated equally toward those objectives. Though a state-of-play-document from February 2018 stated that the "bulk of its resources are dedicated to the creation of jobs and (e)conomic (d)evelopment" only 10% of the funds were allocated to this goal.

The objective of investing primarily in job creation changed only two months later, at an April 2018 meeting of the EUTF's Strategic Board. According to the official minutes, Chair Stefano Manservisi who at the time was head of the European Commission's Directorate General for International Cooperation and Development said a lack of resources had made it necessary to further prioritize existing proposals and focus on "return and reintegration," "refugees management," "securitization of documents and civil registry," "anti-trafficking," "essential stabilization efforts in Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and the Sahel if resources are available," and "migration dialogues."

So it comes as no surprise that almost a quarter of the funds the largest share went into migration management.

It is important to keep in mind that the majority of Africans who leave their homes voluntarily or forced seek to move to neighboring countries and regions within Africa. In 2020, for example, 80% of African migrants did not leave the continent, according to a policy brief by the Institute for Security Studies.

Despite the stated goal of of improving the conditions that cause Africans to migrate irregularly via dangerous routes, the EUTF "had to do more with Europe than with Africa, because for Austria to host 40,000 irregular migrants is more worrisome than for Uganda to host 1.3 million refugees," said Mehari Taddele Maru, a professor at the Migration Policy Centre and formerly the program coordinator for migration at the African Union Commission.

Several of the experts DW spoke with noted that the EU's focus on irregular migration would not necessarily be the most important aspect on the topic of migration for African policymakers.

"A large portion of movements in the past used to happen through legal pathways because of the colonial history so, for example, from Nigeria to the UK, or from Francophone countries to France or Belgium, or to the Middle East due to geographic proximity and religious rituals," Mehari said.

Though an initial stated intent of the EUTF was to also support more legal pathways for Africans to EU countries, the fund ultimately focused mainly on irregular migration. Instead of providing more legal visa opportunities, for example, the objective became to manage the flow of asylum-seekers, refugees, and people who don't have the necessary documents or permits to move or work in another country.

The EU border agency, Frontex, has registered fewer irregular border crossings by African nationals since the EUTF was established in 2015, and Africans have filed fewer applications for asylum in EU member states.

The observed decrease in crossings and applications by citizens of EUTF recipient countries tracked with similar drops in numbers for citizens of all African countries, implying that, overall, the EUTF did not have a measurable impact on migratory movements toward the European Union on this scale.

Though fewer Africans made their way to the European Union, people across the continent continued to leave their homes in increasingly larger numbers. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the number of Africans who left or fled their homes and became internally displaced or refugees in other African countries almost doubled from 2015 to 2020.

"The individual reasons for people moving differ, as do their specific motivations," said Ottilia Anna Maunganidze, who specializes in human security, international law and migration at the Institute for Security Studies and authored a 2021 policy brief on migration from Africa to Europe. "So dedicating any funds should always appreciate this and be tailored appropriately." Maunganidze said the EUTF rollout had done this in some cases, but not in all. In regions where the European Union has maintained a longer presence and relied on local expertise, the tailoring was more successful.

In the case of Niger, Maunganidze said, the EUTF's approach even reinforced what it intended to fight. "Niger is one of the poorer countries on the African continent," she said.

"It's also the youngest, with the median age of just about 14 years of age. When thinking about interventions within Niger, focus really should be on questions of early childhood development, on questions of education, integration and community involvement. But, across the Sahel, the approach has been almost an externalized border policy of the European Union. The focus was on the movement itself and not what are the opportunities that people are not getting at home that result in this desire to move. Now, when you impose a heavily securitized migration-management approach that is intended to contain movement and they impact a local economy and local trade, such that they unfortunately have that unintended consequence of limiting local opportunities pushing people out through irregular channels and dangerous migration routes."

People will still want to move, but, instead of being able to go through legal channels, they are forced to opt for being smuggled across the borders.

Migrants from Niger await boarding ahead of a repatriation flight from the airport of Libyan city Misrata back to their home country.

Maunganidze said the task went beyond taking different demographics into account. "A lot of the issues are structural and systemic and require a long-term engagement in the context to be able to address them," she said. "So it is not necessarily realistic to focus primarily on short-term wins. But, perhaps, if there's an adjustment in terms of implementation of projects, then maybe in the long term that could be realizable but not at the scale of funds that the EUTF has had."

There have been attempts to address the systemic and structural issues. The highest-funded EUTF project, for example, focuses on "state building" in Somalia. The government has been supported with 107 million to reinforce institutions and expand social services, with the primary objective of increasing the trust of other states, potential creditors and the population in the government. According to the project's website, actionable results are two "strategies, laws, policies and plans developed and/or directly supported," as well as four "planning, monitoring, learning, data-collection and analysis systems set up, implemented and/or strengthened" with the funding so far since project start in 2018.

Another example is a 54 million project in Sudan by the UN World Food Programme, which reportedly provided assistance related to nutrition and food security to 1.1 million people. For context: In 2020, a total of 9.6 million Sudanese people were experiencing severe food insecurity, according to the Food Security Information Network.

Young Ethiopians are scanning job offers posted in a display case in Addis Ababa

Then there was a 47.7 million project in Ethiopia directed at building resilience and economic opportunities, which reports creating almost 11,000 jobs with EUTF funding. An absence of paid work is a chronic issue in Ethiopia, where 1.1 million people aged 15 or older were unemployed in 2020, according to estimates by the International Labour Organization.

Because the EUTF was set up as an emergency tool to react to migration and assign projects quickly and flexibly, the fund was not necessarily envisioned as a long-term endeavor. Several observers told DW that the root causes of displacement and migration cannot adequately be addressed by an instrument designed to tackle problems in the short term.

"The EUTF went wrong with the root-causes approach, because of the narrative that it sets: this idea that, once we eradicate the root causes, people are going to stop moving," said Alia Fakhry, a migration researcher at the German Council for Foreign Relations. "Eradicating root causes is one thing, but conflicts and natural disaster will continue to push people away from their homes."

The NDICI, the follow-up to the EUTF, has a much wider scope. Ten percent of its budget is to be dedicated to migration, with a strict monitoring system in place, "but the idea of root causes seems kind of gone," Fakhry said. "Maybe that is where the attention and criticism the EUTF drew paid off."

Edited by: Milan Gagnon

This project is a collaboration among several media outlets in the European Data Journalism Network. While DW was project lead, Voxeurop, Openpolis and OBCT were contributing partners.

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How the EU spent billions to halt migration from Africa - DW (English)