Civil society and government can help ensure that trade benefits the world’s poor, says George Gelber.

When 70,000 Jubilee 2000 supporters ringed the centre of Birmingham on a sunny day in May 1998, they gave G8 leaders a hefty push towards more significant debt cancellation, as the UK Chancellor Gordon Brown acknowledged. After years when international debt had been largely the realm of backroom experts and number crunchers, Jubilee 2000, with its slogan “Drop the debt”, had been able to make it a popular cause. The organisation wound up in December 2000 with its glass of debt cancellation still only half full but it was nevertheless hailed as one of the most successful single issue pressure groups of recent years.

The debt campaign has sparked more questions than answers, in particular about how countries which have benefited, albeit partially, from debt cancellation can avoid accumulating unpayable debts in the future. At the same time the debate on world poverty and its attendant protests have broadened out to encompass all the bodies which are the visible, institutional face of globalisation: the G8 meetings themselves, the World Bank, the IMF, the World Economic Forum and the youngest of them all, the World Trade Organisation.

All of them have already been the target of campaigners, but perhaps it is the WTO that attracts most attention, because it is seen as the institution that is pushing hardest for wider and deeper globalisation and developing trade legislation with teeth that can enforce unpopular decisions. Officials can protest that it is governments and not the WTO that negotiate the agreements but there is little doubt that the WTO itself has a “personality”, depending for its status and its success on the momentum of trade talks and new rounds with new agendas.

The strong feelings about globalisation – and the protests they engender – are real enough, driven by the grotesquely unequal division of wealth and income across the world and shocking and widespread poverty. And many who did not take part in the protests feel uneasy about globalisation and think that the protesters “have a point”. But it takes more than anger to change things. Civil society has to come up with ideas, plans and proposals if it is to influence the politicians and decision makers. Can we repeat Jubilee 2000’s ability to coalesce around a central core demand when we campaign on trade and globalisation? And could such a coalition encompass governments which want to make globalisation work for the poor?

Trade, however, is different from debt. Where debt was a North-South issue, trade criss-crosses the globe – South-South trade accounts for about 10% of all world trade and for 40% of exports of manufactured goods from developing countries. Where the cost of debt cancellation could be shared reasonably equitably among tax payers in creditor countries, and constituted a tiny fraction of national tax burdens, trade agreements create winners and losers – in developed countries the livelihoods of farmers and steel and textile workers are threatened; software engineers in India, teleworkers in the Caribbean and textile workers in Bangladesh stand to gain. Where debt, thanks to Jubilee 2000, was ultimately a simple concept, trade is complex.

Advocates of further trade liberalisation and NGOs approach the same issues from very different starting points. But there are specific areas of policy where, despite fundamental differences of approach, their views coincide. Both sides, for instance, agree that present levels of northern support for agriculture and their by-products – export subsidies and credits for surplus produce and plentiful food aid – are a cost for consumers and grossly unfair competition for southern farmers who might otherwise be able to compete more successfully in domestic and overseas markets.

Many NGOs and governments agree that the 2015 International Development Targets should be used to scrutinise policies and resources, assessing them in terms of whether they help or hinder their achievement of the targets. NGOs would like to see this logic extended to trade policies and other matters, such as intellectual property and services, which now form part of the WTO’s remit. This means a far more discriminating examination of trade rules and policies than the blanket – and questionable – affirmation that overall everyone benefits from trade liberalisation.

NGOs and the British Government also agree that trade is not an end in itself and that it should serve development, but this is a long way from making development a central element of the WTO’s mandate. To put development at the centre of the WTO would mean creating a mechanism for assessing the developmental impact of WTO rules and a means to exempt countries where it could be shown that they were having negative consequences in terms of development. Difficult, certainly, but not impossible.

CAFOD believes that developing countries should retain significant flexibility in agricultural trade in the form of exemptions from commitments under the WTO Agreement on Agriculture to protect livelihoods of small farmers. Together with the South Centre, CAFOD has put forward a proposal for a “Development Box” which aims to achieve this. The beneficiaries of this proposal are not large agro-exporters in countries like Argentina and Brazil but those farmers who, with additional protection and support, could make a decent living from the land and avoid becoming landless labourers or joining the stream of migrants to the cities. The majority of poor people in developing countries still live in rural areas. This is one way to help create the conditions for decent rural livelihoods.

Our question for government is whether potential cooperation on trade issues can become a genuine two-way street with government taking seriously and ultimately supporting proposals originating with civil society – as well as NGOs agreeing to support government on issues that have long been part of the mainstream agenda. This is what happened with the campaign on debt: government came to agree that the overhang of unpayable debt jeopardised development and the achievement of the development targets. This sort of partnership on trade would be far more interesting than tactical agreement to cooperate on issues such as agricultural export subsidies, significant though these may be, on which our views happen for the time being to coincide.

George Gelber is Head of Public Policy at CAFOD

Trade campaigns

With international attention focused on trade and development, many NGOs are tackling the issue. Here, some of the main campaigning organisations outline their plans:

Christian Aid
International trade is a force that could change the lives of many of the world’s poorest people. Trade can create jobs, bring training, and improve people’s livelihoods. But managed badly, it can increase poverty and suffering, and destroy the environment.

This year Christian Aid launched a major new campaign called ‘Trade for Life’. The campaign calls on world leaders to rewrite the rules with poverty reduction recognised as a primary objective. The campaign also calls for the impact of trade rules on poverty to be monitored, and for rules to cover the activities of large multinational companies as well as countries.

Campaigners from all over the country have already been handing in ‘action pledges’ to their local MPs, and putting pressure on party leaders to call for a major review of international trade rules. In November Christian Aid will be launching a major new report analysing the problems with existing trade rules and setting out the alternatives. Christian Aid is working closely with other organisations campaigning on trade issues in the UK as a member of the Trade Justice Movement.

Oxfam
Through its ‘Cut the Cost’ trade campaign, Oxfam is continuing to push the problems of high-priced medicines onto the agenda of the WTO’s Doha ministerial meeting in November. The campaign has made a number of loud, high-profile challenges to the way that WTO patent rules are being used by the pharmaceutical industry to price life-saving drugs out of the reach of poor people.
September is a key month, when the TRIPS Council meets in Geneva for the last time before Doha – a meeting sure to feature high on media and activists’ calendars. Oxfam is also a member of the Trade Justice Movement, a group of charities that is now looking at UK-specific actions around the time of the Doha ministerial. Oxfam International, meanwhile, is gearing up to launch a major campaign on global trade rules later in the New Year.

World Development Movement
The trade campaign of the World Development Movement (WDM) aims to make WTO rules fairer to the poor, through research, lobbying, public campaigning and alliances with others.

WDM is raising public and political awareness about the vitally important General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which covers most of the world’s economy. WDM is concerned that GATS prioritises the liberalisation of trade and investment in service industries as an end it itself, rather than as a means to higher aims, such as poverty reduction. WDM is calling for a comprehensive, independent assessment of experience with liberalisation of services, particularly those essential to the poor, such as water, health care and education, to be undertaken before negotiations proceed further.

Over the forthcoming months, WDM will campaign for the British Government and the EU to reform unfair trade rules and institutional structures, rather than extending the inequities into new areas such as investment, government procurement and further negotiations on GATS. Little has been accomplished since Seattle and the position of the G-77 to “review, repair and reform” the WTO and its agreements remains vital for Doha.

In the longer term, WDM is calling for a new mechanism, outside the WTO, to implement internationally agreed standards on issues such as business practices, human rights, core labour standards and the environment. In order to ensure consistent enforcement, such standards should be enforceable on international business as well as governments.

ActionAid
Trade holds the key to a brighter future for the developing world. But unfair global rules, which favour rich nations’ business, lock the door on the South.

ActionAid’s campaign for reform will intensify amid preparations for the WTO ministerial summit in November. It wants Northern governments to make long-overdue changes which are vital if hopes of halving poverty by 2015 stand a chance of fruition.

Poor countries – which have doubled in number in three decades – have been ordered to allow subsidised goods from western markets. Yet their own goods are barred from these industralised states: hypocrisy which must be addressed. These same nations should at last keep their broken pledge to compensate the least developed countries for the harm caused by enforced imports. They must also review the agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property (TRIPs) that lets big business take control over plants and crops. The livelihoods of millions of farmers are threatened by patents like the one on basmati rice, which many people grow to feed themselves and their families.

These concerns must be tackled before any new issues are raised in another round of global trade negotiations.

Trade Justice Movement
The Trade Justice Movement is a group of organisations – including ActionAid, CAFOD, Christian Aid, the Fairtrade Foundation, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, People & Planet, Traidcraft and the WDM – campaigning together in an attempt to ensure that the world’s poorest people and the environment will get a better deal from trade.

The Movement’s first major event will be the Trade Justice Carnival, which will be held on 3 November in London, just before the WTO meeting in Qatar. The organisers expect that several thousand people will accompany the procession of floats, each one highlighting a different aspect of the world trade rules. Speakers will address the participants after the procession, including No Logo author Naomi Klein.

For more information on the Carnival and the aims of the Trade Justice Movement, visit www.tradejusticemovement.org.uk