Wake up the government

Sounds tempting, doesn’t it? Well, we now all have the chance to do it at the end of what promises to be a night to remember. In the run up to the national election, the attempt to instill a (seemingly long lost) sense of principle into the political elite and challenge the notion that our welfare is only advanced at the expense of others could not be more timely.
Hundreds of thousands of people across the world will be mobilizing as part of the Global Week of Action for Trade Justice from 10-16 April. From sending chickens to parliament in Ghana, to farmers touring the USA, to a festival in Denmark, a series of coordinated actions will demonstrate the strength of global civil society and its desire for a humane world order where people come before profits and unnecessary suffering is not tolerated.
The British – rather out of character – will stay up all night. From 10pm on Friday 15 April, thousands of people will gather at Westminster and attend workshops and other activities, listen to trade campaigners from around the world, have fun and dance to great music, meet other activists over a brew in a warm, dry café. The action will culminate at dawn, in a spectacular lantern/candle-lit procession down Whitehall, which will literally wake up the government to its responsibility towards the developing world.
The extraordinary response of solidarity to the victims of the recent tsunami disaster was only the latest expression of the caring and generous nature of the British people. The plight of those less fortunate is always of public concern, and the UK is one of the largest donors of international development aid. But poor countries do not want our charity; they want to be allowed to lift themselves out of poverty. Aid undoubtedly makes a difference, but it does not address the causes of underdevelopment.
Moreover, as with foreign debt, aid is often used by rich donors as an instrument of control over recipients. But even when our intentions are the best, the absurdity of our short-sighted policies is breathtaking. Overall, for every $1 rich countries give in aid, they take $2 through unfair trade and they spend on domestic agricultural subsidies more than six times what they spend on overseas aid. Take the example of Mali in Western Africa: in 2002, the country received $37m in aid but lost $43m as a result of lower export earnings, and that was just the cost of US cotton subsidies. A 50% cut in the tariffs the North imposes on southern products will provide three times what these countries receive in aid. The cost of trade barriers to developing countries is estimated at $700b a year in lost export earnings. That amount could provide universal education and access to clean water and sanitation and pay for HIV/Aids prevention, treatment and support for a year in low and middle-income countries…32 times over! The scale is almost inconceivable.
The fact that 14% of the wold population shares 75% of world’s trade income rather implies that globalization does not exactly operate in a level playing field. Poor countries have been severely disadvantaged to begin with: centuries of colonialism put in place a system of extreme dependency on a narrow range of primary commodity exports which remains to this day, with just three commodities accounting for 75% of total exports in each of the 48 poorest nations. This coerced concentration on export crops has not only compromised their self-reliance in terms of producing their own food, but, with prices in constant decline, also amounts to a huge transfer of economic resources from the South to the North. Only from 1997 to 2001 primary commodities lost more than half their purchasing power compared to manufactured goods, meaning that poor countries had to export twice as much to purchase the same amount of imports. That creates a vicious circle whereby they are forced to grow more for export and that over-production pushes prices down even further. It sounds incredible, but basically the more they trade, the poorer they get.
Prices, of course, do not just happen to fall. We encourage over-production and our subsidies have also a lot to do with it. European and American cows are subsidised at $2 a day, more than what 40% of the world population lives on. These massive subsidies allow farmers to sell their products even below cost. The surpluses are then dumped on poor countries, where local producers can simply not compete and go bust. Meanwhile, the main beneficiaries of this system are big farmers and agri-business.
All the rhetoric about free trade conceals our hypocritical stance of ‘do what we say, not what we do’. Through persuasion, coercion and bullying, poor countries have been forced to open up their markets and abandon any protection to their vulnerable industries against multinational giants but their actions have not been reciprocated. On average their products face tariffs four times the size of those faced by other rich countries, while other non-tariff barriers such as quotas further put our markets out of their reach.
The British government has shown some sings of willingness to address the immense injustice and exploitation that run through the global economic system. By holding both the G8 and the EU presidency in 2005, it is in a unique position to push these things through. We have to make sure they do. Let’s start with staying up all night.

Link: www.april2005.org