Can multilateral trade work for the poor?

> Agenda, February 2007

Protectionism, self-reliance and village republics are not enough to lift 1.3 billion of the world’s poor out of absolute poverty. There is sufficient empirical evidence to demonstrate that trade can be a powerful catalyst for poverty reduction, that free trade with fairer policies will benefit the world’s poor more than aid or charity. The problem is that World Trade Organisation negotiations and global trade are far from free and fair, with the balance skewed in favour of powerful trading (...) read

date of on-line publication : 25 October 2007

Transnational Institute (TNI)

South-South strategic alternatives to the global economic system and power regime

In recent years, the governments of many Southern countries have come to realise that the international trade and investment regime is thoroughly biased in favour of the interests of the richest and most powerful countries. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is at an impasse and neo-liberalism in general is in crisis. The appetite for alternatives is growing. This extends to the global power regime. While few would hanker for the old bi-polar Cold War world, even fewer find the current (...) read

date of on-line publication : 20 December 2006

Coordination SUD

Agriculture: for a regulation of world trade, placing development at the centre of WTO negotiations on the Agreement on Agriculture

Recommendations of the French International Solidarity NGOs on the occasion of the 6th WTO Ministerial Conference

> Gret - Coordination SUD, 2005/12, PDF, 106 pp.

http://www.gret.org/ressource/pdf/07 (...)

« International trade is [...] not the answer to the priority needs of rural Thailand, but it seems to be the only concern of the policies implemented. » This statement by a Thai small-scale farmer reflects the despair expressed by nume-rous organisations, partners of Coordination SUD’s members working in rural areas. It challenges the validity of the postulate that guides the trade nego-tiations underway and maintains that all one needs to do is facilitate interna-tional trade to overcome poverty and ensure the development of poor countries.
In this report, Coordination SUD’s Agriculture and Food Commission attempts to make more explicit the extent to which the trade policies of the past two decades have or have not made it possible to attain the proclaimed goals of fighting hunger and poverty. This work was done in partnership with organisations in the South, through case studies of six particularly sensitive agricultural products : rice, sugar, bananas, chicken, milk and cotton. Each of these products illustrates different facets of the stakes involved in commercial trade liberalisation on the multilateral level. Based on the observation that trade policies as they are currently conceived do not benefit the poorest, this report sets forth a number of proposals that aim to replace development at the centre of trade nego-tiations, and especially the negotiations that will take place during the WTO’s Sixth Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong from 13 to 18 December 2005. read

date of on-line publication : 21 December 2005