"We must help poor countries": Hilary Benn on fair trade and beyond
In the Sunday Telegraph on March 5, 2006, Hilary Benn writes:
Last year was an extraordinary year for development. Commitments by the EU and
G8 will result in an extra $50 billion a year in aid by 2010. Half of that will
go to Africa and help achieve close to universal AIDS treatment by 2010 and
access to free basic education and health care by 2015.
None of this would have been possible without the Make Poverty History campaign
in the UK, without Live8, and without campaigns around the world calling for
justice, not charity. 2005 showed how much British people care about helping
others to change their lives for the better.
Taking action at home to help people in the developing world is exactly what
fairtrade is all about. Buying a fairtrade product changes lives – I’ve seen it
for myself.
A fairtrade product is no longer a strange item bought only in specialist shops
by “activists”. Fairtrade products are everyday items that can be found
everywhere, even the fruit you first see when you walk into your local
supermarket. The fairtrade mark so successfully developed by the Fairtrade
Foundation can be found on the side of coffee jars, boxes of tea bags, chocolate
wrappers and bags of bananas.
The range of products is still growing. In fact it is because they are the sort of things you will find in every shopping trolley that fairtrade has the potential to affect the lives of those who produced them thousands of miles away.
So why should we care about fairtrade? And what’s in it for us?
Fairtrade is an incredibly powerful idea. By buying a fairtrade product from
someone we’ve never met we know that that person will get a fair price for their
labour. This helps to mitigate the impact of falling prices for the things poor
people produce, like cocoa, coffee, sugar and so on. We can make a real impact
on the lives of the poor.
I was fortunate enough to spend a day at a village in Ghana, and meet farmers
who had set up their own co-operative so they could grow and sell cocoa. I went
with a group of them into a nearby plantation where they cut open piles of cocoa
pods with machetes and scooped out the valuable white bean inside. These were
dried by the heat of the sun on top of bamboo mats then sold to the Kuapa Kokoo
farmers’ co-op for a higher price than they would receive from the government.
Kuapa Kokoo – which means “good cocoa growers” – then weighs, packs and
transports the cocoa to market. It has proved so popular that today Kuapa Kokoo
has more than 45,000 members organised in 12,000 village societies across Ghana.
The Day Chocolate Company was later set up by Kuapa Kokoo and others with
financial support from DFID, to enable the raw product harvested in Ghana to be
turned into chocolate bars available in the UK. Today the Divine and Dubble
brands of chocolate are the new bars on the block. Divine’s Dark chocolate even
received full marks in a taste test organised by the Daily Telegraph proving
that buying fairtrade is a good thing to do and tasty!
UK support for fairtrade extends to farmers in Belize who are providing the
cocoa for Green & Black’s Maya Gold chocolate, to fruit growers in South Africa
who, in the words of Nelson Mandela, are helping to create, “a whole new
generation of proud and committed fruit entrepreneurs”. The Thandi project,
which has the backing of South Africa’s largest fruit exporter and the national
department of trade, aims to make black South Africans world class fruit growers
while providing funding for medical centres, clean water and investment in
businesses. Their seedless grapes are available in UK supermarkets alongside
other fairtrade fruit.
But for all the success of fairtrade products, rich countries need to address the underlying causes of trade inequality, and that is the thornier issue of trade justice.
My visits overseas have made me acutely aware of the unfairness
of the global trading system. In Ghana, the livelihood of over 2 million
small-scale producers depends on cocoa, with exports making up just over a tenth
of Ghana's national income. But Ghanaian producers cannot take full advantage of
rich country markets. There are higher taxes for processed products than for raw
cocoa beans, which discourages investment in production of cocoa powder or
chocolate that would sell for more in those markets. In Japan for example a
chocolate bar from Ghana would face a whopping 280 per cent tariff.
We have to change that.
The World Trade Organisation – although it comes in for some criticism - offers
poor countries the best chance of trading their way out of poverty and of
providing the healthcare, schooling, social security and infrastructure we take
for granted in the UK.
I attended the WTO trade talks in Hong Kong at the end of 2005. Getting 149
countries to reach an agreement on international trade rules was always going to
be difficult, and so it proved. But there was just enough progress on a few
important issues to give us hope of reaching a better deal for poor people in
2006. We are now working hard to make that happen.
At Hong Kong it was decided that all rich countries will grant free access for
97 per cent of products originating from the very poorest countries in the
world. However, the remaining 3 per cent means developed countries can exclude
those products of greatest interest to poor countries, such as clothing and
textiles. Subsidies given to farmers in rich countries to export agricultural
products overseas will be phased out by 2013, with those given to cotton farmers
coming to an end sooner. But there was no commitment to phase out domestic
subsidies paid to farmers nationally.
Rich countries, including the UK, need to do more to create a less distorted
trading system. 2006 is the last chance for a deal that will truly benefit poor
countries. This is a huge challenge but failure to reach a deal would be
devastating for poor people. All the WTO members now need to move together to
achieve a successful outcome that gives poor countries greater access to our
markets, this will ultimately do far more for the poorest countries than aid
alone.
The good news is that people don’t have to wait for governments to change lives. We can all make a contribution simply by picking a fairtrade product off the shelf. It sends a clear message to the decision makers – give the poor people in the developing world a chance.
