Mensaje del debate
Do you want free trade – or fair trade that helps the poor? Friday, 1 August 2008
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Subject: [toeslist] Do you want free trade =?windows-1252?Q?=96_or_fair_trade_?= =?windows-1252?Q?that_helps_the_poor=3F_Friday=2C_1_August_?= =?windows-1252?Q?2008_?=
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Johann Hari: Do you want free trade or fair trade that helps the poor?
Friday, 1 August 2008
Whenever the world trade talks begin to seem like a coma-inducing
bore-a-thon, I am jolted back to consciousness by the throat-stripping
smell of rubbish; miles of rotting rubbish. A few years ago I found
Adelina a skinny little scrap of an eight-year-old living in a
rubbish dump, where this stench made her eyes water all the time. It is
this smell and her sore, salty eyes that hung over the corpse of the
Doha trade talks this week.
Just outside the Peruvian capital of Lima, there is a groaning valley of
trash, and, inside it, hordes of children try to stay alive. Adelina
spends her days picking through the refuse looking for something
anything she can sell on for a few pennies. Then she returns to the
few steel sheets she calls home to sleep on a crunchy carpet of cans.
She has never left the rubbish dump; its walls are the walls of her
consciousness. She told me three of her friends had recently died by
falling into the rubbish, or being pricked by fetid needles, or slipping
on to broken glass. I asked her how often she eats, and she shrugged: "I
don't like to eat much anyway." She will be 10 now, if she has survived.
When we juggle the dry, dull statistics of world trade, we are really
asking if Adelina will remain in her rubbish dump and if her children,
and grandchildren, will live and die there.
The way we the rich world organise the world trading system today
traps Adelina. But it just broke. This week, in Switzerland, the poor
countries of the world refused to play along with the Doha trade
negotiations. The mass movement of ordinary people demanding our
governments Make Poverty History that rose up in 2005 needs urgently to
reconvene.
To help Adelina, we need to start with a basic question: how do poor
countries turn into rich countries? The institutions that dominate world
trade especially the World Trade Organisation (WTO) have a simple
answer: all markets, all the time. They tell poor countries to abolish
all subsidies, protections and tariffs that protect their own goods. If
you fling yourself naked at the global market, you will rise. If the
poor countries disagree, they are cajoled to do as we say.
There's just one problem: every rich country got rich by ignoring the
advice we now so aggressively offer. If we had listened to it, Britain
would still be an agrarian economy manufacturing raw wool, and the US
would be primarily farming cotton.
Look at the most startling eradication of poverty in the 20th century:
South Korea. In 1963, the average South Korean earned just $179 a year,
less than half the income of a Ghanaian. Its main export was wigs made
of human hair, and Samsung was a fishmonger's. Today, it is one of the
richest countries on earth. The country has been transformed from
Senegal to Spain in one human lifetime. How?
South Korea did everything we were pressing the poor at Doha not to do.
Dr Ha-Joon Chang, a South Korean economist at Cambridge University,
explains in his book Bad Samaritans: "The Korean state nurtured certain
new industries selected by the government through tariff protection,
subsidies and other forms of government support, until they 'grew up'
enough to withstand international competition." They owned all the
banks; they controlled foreign investment tightly. The state controlled
and guided the economy to the international marketplace.
But we are so pickled in market fundamentalist ideology that we have
blotted out this history and even our own. Until the Tudors, Britain
was a backward rural country dependent on exporting raw wool. Turning
that wool profitably into clothes happened elsewhere. Henry VII wanted
Britain to catch up so he set up manufacturing bases, and banned the
export of wool, so clothes were manufactured here. It's called
protectionism. His successors kept it up: by 1820, our average tariff
rate was 50 per cent. Within a century, protected British industries had
spurted ahead of their European competitors so the walls could finally
be dismantled. Dr Chang explains: "Trade liberalisation has been the
outcome of economic development not its cause."
The US did the same. By 1820, the average tariff was 40 per cent;
Abraham Lincoln then pushed them higher, and they stayed there until the
First World War. Yet if Lincoln had been at the Doha trade talks, the
United States of 2008 would have described him as a "fool" who was
"harming his own people" with "despicable policies".
Before you make your child work, you give him an education and skills
and abilities. Before a country pushes its infant industries on to the
world market, it needs to do just that. Nokia, Samsung and Toyota all
had to be cushioned with subsidies and tariffs for decades before they
made a cent. Every one of these companies would have been stampeded to
death on the open market as a toddler otherwise.
Yet the reaction to the poor world's rejection of Doha in our media has
been mostly bemusement. Why have these simple-minded povvos declined our
medicine? Are they mad? Amy Barry of Oxfam provides a quiet
counter-balance, pointing out that if the agreement on the table at Doha
had gone through, Brazil alone would have lost 1.2 million jobs, and
"most poor countries would have deindustrialised, or never
industrialised at all".
From the rubble of Doha, a new world trade system needs to be built
on the principle of fair trade, not free trade. If we really want to end
extreme poverty, then we need to open up the markets of rich countries,
while allowing poor countries to protect and subsidise theirs. It is the
recipe that ensured you, today, are not hungry and tilling the fields.
But the WTO can only ever achieve half of that goal, at best. It is
built on the market vision that there should be no trade barriers or
"distortions" anywhere. That means opening up rich markets, which is
great. But for each step in that direction, they demand a symmetrical
concession from the poor. It is like telling Bill Gates and Adelina they
both have to make sacrifices and Gates won't shift until she does.
Here in the EU and US, there are hefty forces determined to smother fair
trade in its cot. The current system works well for corporations, who
get to wrench open poor economies without any risk of local competitors
rising up. It works well for some slivers of workers here too, who
thrive on rich-world subsidies. These forces are regrouping, but their
system is lying in a crunched-up heap by the side of the road.
Our governments will always find a way to put these powerful sectional
interests first unless we, the people, make them do otherwise. Today,
Adelina needs Make Poverty History to rise again to demand fair trade,
not on a few fancy supermarket shelves, but as the principle governing
world trade. Let the poor do what we did. Let them rise. Otherwise,
those rivers of rubbish will be home to generation after generation of
Adelinas the world over, and the stench will never clear.
j.h...@independent.co.uk )independent.co.uk
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