As world leaders prepare to gather in Cancun, Mexico for a crucial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (10-14 September), Christian relief and development agency Tearfund is calling on the British Government to make good on its promise to ‘act for the world’s poor’ by reforming world trade rules.
As a member of the Trade Justice Movement, Tearfund believes that the test of progress in Cancun will be whether rich country governments, including the UK, champion issues that poor countries want to see addressed – such as the double standards in agriculture – and put an end to attempts to increase the World Trade Organisation (WTO) agenda to include four new issues, including investment.
In a recent statement Patricia Hewitt, Trade and Industry Secretary, who will head up the Government’s Cancun delegation, recognises the need to reform trade rules to benefit the poor, issuing a promise that the Government will act ‘even if there is no direct benefit to the UK.’ Ms Hewitt promises that ‘…we will not accept any proposal we believe will damage the prospects of poor countries trading themselves out of poverty.’
However, Mari Griffith, Tearfund’s Trade Campaigns Officer, is concerned that despite the Government’s promises, poor countries’ interests will continue to be overlooked as rich nations seek to reinforce the inequalities of the current trading system.
“Whilst we welcome Patricia Hewitt’s promise to safeguard developing countries’ interests, the Government should instead agree not to accept any proposal that developing countries themselves believe will damage their prospects of trading themselves out of poverty. Surely developing countries are better placed to decide what is in their interests.”
A contentious issue being discussed in Cancun next week is agriculture. “Recent wranglings between the US and the EU over subsidies for their own farmers exposes the double standards that lie at the heart of the world trade system. While the EU and US squabble over ways to tinker at the edges of their own protectionism, they exert considerable pressure on developing countries to open their fragile markets. The hypocrisy is scandalous,” says Mari Griffith.
Rich countries subsidise their farmers to a tune of £224 billion a year encouraging surpluses that are sometimes dumped on poor country markets, at prices that local farmers have little hope of competing with. Meanwhile, rich countries fiercely guard their own markets by imposing taxes on imports, restricting goods from the developing world. And all along, rich countries are forcing developing countries to open up their markets and flooding them with cheap exports.
Tearfund welcomes the recent move by eleven African countries, including Kenya and Zambia, to stem the tide of pressure from western nations, including Britain, to expand the WTO agenda. Says Mari Griffith, “The WTO agenda is already bursting at the seams. This is not the time to increase the burden on overstretched and under-resourced negotiating teams from developing countries.” At the previous WTO meeting in Doha, Qatar in 2001, the European Union’s (EU) negotiating team had 502 delegates. Haiti had no delegates.
“Poor countries need special and differential treatment in world trade. There needs to be a fundamental change in the rules that recognise that poor countries need different policies to rich countries. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution,” says Mari Griffith.
The United Nations estimates that if trade rules were reworked in favour of poor countries, they could reap benefits of up to $700 billion a year – a massive 14 times what is currently received in aid and 30 times the amount of debt repayments by poor countries.