This week, 10 million people in 70 countries are taking to the streets to protest unfair trade rules.
The Global Week of Action is the largest ever mobilization for trade justice. Campaigners and people living in poverty will join forces to demand changes to the trade rules that force the world's poorest people further into poverty and deny them the right to defend themselves.
Some of the events include:
- In rural Zambia, a huge mobilization of cotton farmers, harmed by U.S. dumping on the world market, present Oxfam's "Big Noise" petition to the country's president;
- In Geneva, Colin Firth presents the "Big Noise" to the head of the World Trade Organization;
- In Accra, Ghana, farmers harmed by IMF loan conditions that allow cheap imported rice will hold a rice-tasting bazaar;
- In the United States, events are planned in more than 95 cities, including hunger banquets in nearly all 50 states;
- In central Jakarta, Indonesia, there'll be an organic cooking competition and a contest for the best letter written to a farmer by a schoolchild;
- In Madrid, the first of 15 "Night Live" concerts will be held for Oxfam's Make Trade Fair campaign;
- In Ottawa, volunteers will stage a mock funeral for rice farmers in front of Parliament.
For Oxfam, the week is about building solidarity with poor farmers, who make up most of the billion people living on less than a dollar a day. Too many of them have been driven to destitution by the rules and practices that govern agricultural trade.
Oxfam's new report on trade, Kicking Down the Door, describes the vicious scam that keeps trade from becoming the solution to global poverty it should be: First, IMF and World Bank loan conditions force countries to drastically open their markets to imported rice, wheat, corn and other staples.
Then WTO rules permit Europe and the United States to dump their subsidized surpluses there. And the same WTO and IMF rules and conditions prohibit poor countries from raising tariffs to defend themselves.
The result: more hunger, more poverty. Rather than encouraging food production and letting people work their way out of poverty, trade rules do the opposite. And now rich countries are insisting on further tariff cuts at the WTO for all but the poorest.
Rice is the world's most vital crop, providing livelihoods for two billion people -- one-third of humanity. Fully half of the world's people rely on rice for food. Yet, under the WTO negotiations, India and China, together home to 820 million rice farmers, are among 13 developing countries that could be forced to slash their rice tariffs.
Meanwhile, rich countries continue to provide heavy subsidies: Japan, the U.S. and the EU combined provided more than $20 billion to their rice producers in 2002. The U.S. is the world's third largest rice exporter even when its rice costs more than twice as much to grow as in Thailand or Vietnam, and survives only because the government foots the bill -- in 2003 for 72 per cent of the cost.
Look at the effect on Haiti: in 1995, the IMF forced the government to cut its rice tariffs from 35 per cent to just three per cent, and today, three out of every four plates of rice eaten in Haiti come from the U.S. Haiti's rice-growing areas now have among the highest levels of malnutrition and poverty in the country.
Open markets make for a great sermon. But no country that is rich today ever practised what it preaches. None of them opened up to cheap food imports before their farmers were competitive. Abruptly lowering tariffs on food in a country where most people are poor farmers is a recipe for disaster.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Africa Commission report said it forthrightly: Decisions on whether to open markets, "should not be dictated with trade agreements as part of mercantilist negotiations, or as part of World Bank or IMF programs."
Finance Minister Ralph Goodale helped write that report. We'd love to see him act on it at the spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF this weekend.
And at the WTO, Canada's negotiators should take a less aggressive approach in seeking access to poor countries' markets. Canada doesn't dump its exports like the U.S. and EU, but Canada's drive to lower tariffs quickly can be just as devastating.
Canada should acknowledge poor countries' legitimate need to manage their markets the way we do and always have done.
Truly, what Canadian farmer would want to profit at the cost of driving even poorer farmers into destitution? Flexible rules will benefit Canadian farmers and farmers overseas.
The millions of poor farmers who will demonstrate this week know only too well that making trade fair is essential if we are ever to make progress in the fight to make poverty history.
Michelle Beveridge is the policy officer for international trade and agriculture issues for Oxfam Canada. To download a copy of Oxfam's report, visit www.oxfam.ca.This week, 10 million people in 70 countries are taking to the streets to protest unfair trade rules.
