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MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY
VIEW
PICTURES FROM THE 'WAKE UP TO TRADE JUSTICE' VIGIL
Global Week of Action 
10-16 April 2005
http://www.christianaid.org.uk/campaign/weekofaction/index.htm
Take action!
1. 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
List of participating organisations
List of registered events
More background
information
2. 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.
3. 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
Sunday 10 April
Global Week of Action church services across the world, using
a specially prepared liturgy from the World Council of Churches.
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. More
- 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.
For more details of events click
here
4. 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.
5. 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 country governments must immediately
end all export subsidies
6. Real lives destroyed – case
studies
At its heart, trade is not an economic issue;
it's a human one. It affects the lives and livelihoods of poor
people across the world every day. Here are four of their stories,
taken from the Action and Worship Guides written by the Ecumenical
Advocacy Alliance for the Global Week of Action
Click here for the Action and Worship Guides
Click here for more stories
Water in Ghana
‘Sometimes I will go without food so that my grandchildren
can have water.’ Hawa
Hawa lives in the capital but has little access
to water. And the price she has to pay is rising. This is because
the World Bank and the IMF made water privatisation a condition
of giving aid to Ghana and the price has risen to attract private
investment. However, these private companies have no obligation
to invest in poorer areas.
Cotton in Kenya
‘What sort of efficiency is it that leaves thousands of
farmers unproductive, families hungry and parents unable to send
their children to school?’ Susie Ibutu
Susie Ibutu works with poor farmers in Kenya.
The economic reforms imposed by the IMF led to the spectacular
collapse of the Kenyan cotton industry. Tariffs on imported clothing
were removed and government support was drastically cut. By 2000,
cotton production was worth less than 5% of its value in the 1980s.
Onions in Senegal
‘When we come back from the market it is heartbreaking.
The money we get is not worth our hard labour’ Bolo Sy
Bolo Sy’s livelihood has been destroyed.
As a Senegalese onion farmer, she can no longer compete on the
local market with imported onions from Holland. International
trade rules do not allow the Senegalese government to protect
the market and provide subsidies to local farmers.
Rice in Honduras
‘Once this was all rice - as far as you can see. And this
is what I want it to be again.’ Maria Marcos Riveira
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 like Maria Marcos
Riveira 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.
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