What is the Global Week of Action?
From 10-16 April 2005 trade campaigns across the world are taking action together for trade justice. It’s set to be one of the biggest global protests ever seen. Over 10 million people, from thousands of organisations, in 70 countries are expected to take part. And it’s the first big event of 2005: the year that many are saying offers a unique chance to end extreme poverty once and for all.
Our message is:
– free trade is not working
– rich-country governments and the international institutions they control must stop forcing economic liberalisation on the world’s poor
– we need Trade Justice not Free Trade
What are the aims of the week?
– To challenge the free trade myth which says that the only way to reduce poverty across the world is through more and more free trade, liberalisation and privatisation. – To expose the devastating results of Northern government policies which seek to impose free trade wherever they can (except when it comes to subsidising Northern agriculture) – To tell the stories of those who are suffering at the sharp end of international trade. – To show that trade is about more than business and economics – it’s about food, water, health, education and livelihoods.
– To put forward alternatives to the current trade system. – To show the scale of the global movement for Trade Justice.
What events are planned?
Thousands of different events are planned across the world from public debates, art competitions and votes for Trade Justice, to concerts, mass rallies and sending live chickens to parliament. From nation-wide petitions and farmers hearings to unfair football matches and exposure visits for MPs to meet those suffering at the sharp end of international trade.
Each national campaign is planning its own events, but there are some common events happening in many different countries
Monday 11 April
Global fast for Trade Justice, in solidarity with the 850 million people who go to bed hungry every night.
Throughout the week
– Postcard, e-mail, letter-writing campaigns to national IMF / World Bank offices calling for an end to economic liberalisation conditions imposed on loans and debt relief. – Petitions and Votes for Trade Justice in the UK, Bangladesh, India, Netherlands, Zambia. – Unfair football matches in Denmark, Germany, Kenya, and an unfair basketball match in France.
– Sending chickens to parliament in Ghana and Senegal and shoes to Parliament in South Africa to highlight the effects of trade liberalisation on the poultry and garment industries.
Friday 15 and Saturday 16 April
Mass public events to end the Global Week of Action including concerts, rallies, demonstrations and vigils. Details at www.april2005.org
What is wrong with free trade?
As the world gets richer, poor people should share in the benefits. But they aren’t. Instead millions of people are stuck in poverty, barely earning enough to survive. 30,000 children still die needlessly from extreme poverty every single day.
Enforced “free” trade policies and economic liberalisation are central to this continuing scandal. International trade rules rob poor countries of £1.3 billion a day – 14 times what they get in aid.
Much of the media debate about trade has focused on the need to cut rich-countries’ subsidies, and offer increased access to Northern markets for goods from developing countries. Although important, these changes will never achieve the reductions in poverty we are hoping for without tackling the underlying problem – that rich countries are forcing so called “free” trade policies on poor countries.
Enforced liberalisation
For years, rich countries, and the international institutions they control, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, openly used their influence to force poor countries to open their markets and cut the support they gave to poor producers and privatise essential services.
In the face of growing criticism methods have changed but the effect is the same.
Rich countries continue to abuse their power. Through economic liberalisation conditions, attached to aid, loans and debt relief, through pressure and “advice,” through multilateral, regional and bilateral free trade agreements, through biased “advice” and heavy-handed pressure, rich countries continue to force “free trade” policies on the developing world.
As a result, thousands of the world’s poorest people are struggling to survive, to make a living, to send their children to school. In the unfair competition between rich and poor the poor will never win.
It may sometimes be right to open a particular sector of the economy to competition, but developing country governments must have the right to decide which sectors to open and when.
Faced with growing evidence about the social, economic and environmental costs of free trade policies, and under pressure from public opinion, government rhetoric has begun to change. However, while the rhetoric has shifted, the practice remains substantially the same.
What are our specific demands?
To achieve trade justice, governments must change their policies and stop forcing liberalisation on poor countries. Poor countries must have control over their own development.
Organisations involved in the Global Week of Action are calling for change in a number of areas. They will differ according to country, but fall broadly into the following four demands.
(i) An end to enforced liberalisation at the World Trade Organisation
The core WTO agenda leading up to the Hong Kong Ministerial at the end of 2005 will see developing countries exposed to huge pressure to open up their industrial, services and agricultural markets. Meanwhile, talks on special and differential treatment for developing countries languish, having received scant attention in the ‘July package’ finally agreed by WTO members in August 2004.
Governments, particularly rich-country governments, must ensure that poor countries are not forced to further liberalise their industrial, services or agricultural sectors through the trade negotiations at the WTO.
(ii) An end to liberalisation conditions imposed by the IMF / World Bank
The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) impose risky and unproven economic reforms on poor countries by attaching conditions to debt relief and aid [and pressure / advice?]. Countries are pressured to cut public spending, to open their markets to foreign trade and investment, to cut state subsidies and to privatise state-owned enterprises, including public services. Many poor countries also require an IMF seal of approval in order to get aid from other countries, giving the IMF immense influence “behind the scenes”.
Governments, particularly rich-country governments, should stop the World Bank and IMF imposing trade policy conditions on poor countries.
(iii) An end to liberalisation pushed through Regional and Bilateral Trade Agreements
In recent years there have been a growing number of free trade agreements negotiated between countries and within regions. Examples include the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the EU and African, Caribbean and Pacific countries.
These agreements are usually negotiated between countries at vastly different levels of economic development, and have little to offer in the way of poverty reduction. They are often thinly disguised attempts to drive forward a liberalisation agenda more quickly than the WTO, and to reintroduce some of the issues rejected by the WTO such as on competition and investment
Governments, particularly rich-country governments, must stop pursuing Free Trade Agreements that put the interest of business before the needs and rights of local people and communities.
(iv) An end to agricultural dumping
OECD countries subsidise their farmers with billions of $US every year. This produce is then dumped produce on developing country markets. It is sold at below the cost of production, driving down the price of local produce and having devastating effects on developing country economies.
Rich-country governments must immediately end all export subsidies
At the beginning of the 1990s Honduras produced 50,000 tons of rice per year. By 2001, overwhelmed by imports, it produced just over 7000 tons. The government-run rice marketing board used to operate a price-support system for Honduran rice farmers and also controlled imports. However, this was restructured in the 1990s as one of the conditions of the structural adjustment agreement with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. This has meant that for the last 10 years Honduran rice has been competing with imports of heavily subsidized rice from the US. One by one, poor, small scale family farmers have dropped out of the rice market and slipped back to subsistence farming.
What is true for cotton in Kenya, onions in Senegal, water in Ghana and rice in Honduras is also true for corn and coffee and milk and vegetables and countless other products in village after village, community after community, across the poorest regions of the world.
For more information visit www.april2005.org or www.makepovertyhistory.org