The Rt. Hon. Patricia Hewitt

TUC Globalisation and Gender Conference

The trade union movement and this Labour Government share, at our core, a determination to strike out injustice and inequality wherever we find it. I've worked with many of you over the last twenty years as we've struggled for fairness in place of prejudice and social justice in place of poverty. With 1.5 million more people in work, the Minimum Wage now almost £5 and the right to four weeks paid holiday every year, we've come a long way but there's still a long way to go.

We're the 4th largest economy in the world but still have children growing up in homes where no one has worked for a generation. Growing up barely able to read and write, at risk from poverty, crime and drugs.

Wasted lives - wasted economic potential.

Women lose £250,000 during our lives for being women. Afro-Caribbean graduates working as taxi drivers because it's better than the dole. Older people dumped on the scrap heap long before they either should or want to be. We're tackling all discrimination. Not just because it's good for our economy that everyone has access to high skill, high wage, high value jobs, which it is, but, above and beyond this, because it's right.

And we believe in social justice and equality. But our belief in social justice and equality extends beyond these shores. And our values for people here must be our values for people everywhere. And poverty and inequality here, shocking though it is, is dwarfed around the world.

• Women represent half of the world's population and are responsible for half of world food production yet receive only 1/10 of total income and own only 1/100 of the world's property
  
  
• 1.2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day - 7 out of 10 are women.
  
  
• 42 million people with HIV/AIDS. 6 out of 10 are women. And women are the fastest growing group of sufferers.
  
  
• More than half a million women die in pregnancy and childbirth every year. Half - in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The face of poverty in Britain and around the world is the face of a black woman.

In the 80s, with 3 million unemployed, our eyes were on problems at home. Now, with long term unemployment virtually eliminated, our attention is on the rest of the world. Remoteness and ignorance are no longer an excuse for inaction. When pictures of famine in Ethiopia came through to our living rooms 20 years ago, there was a surge of support for action. And we can't hide from it. As a trading nation, we know that what happens in one country has consequence elsewhere. And this makes the pictures of starvation all the more unsettling. Particularly after the divisions and disagreements over Iraq. So a huge coalition is now emerging to tackle this, between Government, business, trade unions, NGOs and women's groups. Just this week alone, I've spoken at events at the Fabian Society and the London School of Economics. I've felt a surge of energy and commitment to tackling it.

But there are disagreements about how we tackle it. Faced with this concern and human wreckage, many people are turning against globalisation in general and America in particular.

Leaving aside the question of whether it's possible to stop or slow down globalisation, and I don't believe it is, I don't think it would be desirable if we did. Experience of the last fifty years show that disengaging from the world economy just means missing out on rising world prosperity.

In 1955, Ghana was 25% richer than South Korea. Today, South Korea is seven times better off than Ghana. A few factors have been at play, investment in education and sound fiscal policies played their part, but what was really important was the realisation that firms that were exposed to international competitive pressure were more likely to succeed in the long run.

During the 1990s, the number of people living in poverty in the world fell by 125 million. This was almost entirely due to improvements in India and China spurred by their economies increased openness to trade. Once the opportunity out of poverty is there, countries are on the escalator out of the poverty. If people have a chance of a better life they'll take it. And the more people you see around you enjoying prosperity, the more other people will grasp it.

It's an upward spiral of prosperity.

I've seen it in my constituency, with the New Deal, Minimum Wage and tax credits helping people get into work. I've seen it:

• in India - with ICICI bank providing help for low caste women. Teaching basic finances and providing finance for micro-businesses.
  
  
• In Bangladesh - with the Grameen bank and the Government - helping women in Bangladeshi villages set up new enterprises.
  
  
• in Nong Ta Kai village in north-east Thailand. Years ago, the women there worked in rice fields, their only hope of escape from poverty to flee to the city, vulnerable to exploitation and to prostitution. Now, they have created their own silk weaving co-operative. They used to live in old wooden shacks. Now the shacks are used for storage and they are living in modern two-storey houses that they've paid for with their own money from their own work.

So we know the answer lies in opportunity. Creating the opportunity for prosperity. Because it is only once there is prosperity around the world that we will genuinely have security around the world. And, at the moment, some trade rules conspire against opportunity. Against prosperity. Against security.

Instead of blowing people upward into that spiral of prosperity, they are holding them underwater, locking the impoverished in poverty, denying them the one thing they need more than anything else. Hope.

In Mozambique, 75% of the rural population lives in poverty. Sugar's their biggest industry. Yet the industry employs half the people it should and generates $150 million less than it should, because of our subsidies on exports and our barriers on imports in the EU. It costs us twice as much to make sugar in the EU as it does in Mozambique. Yet we're rigging the market and giving them £136 million in aid. This is LESS than they would make for themselves if the markets weren't rigged.

We are giving with one hand and taking away with the other.

Another example, in the US, cotton producers received nearly $4 billion in assistance in 2001/02. This is more than the entire GDP of Benin, a country where the cotton industry, now in crisis, accounts for 85% of exports and 20% of total income.

The same with fruit and vegetables. We levy on imports when our domestic crop is in harvest and only remove them when it's out of season. We then impose tariffs on products like processed pineapples, fruit juices and jams to compensate for the high prices manufacturers have to pay for sugar!

There are examples like this all around the world. In Japan, the price of rice is around 8 to 10 times the world price. Faced with these sorts of inequities, it's easy to get downhearted.

But things are already changing.

Take the final result of the CAP reform negotiations that concluded in the early hours of yesterday morning. As Margaret Beckett has said "it is hard to over-state the importance of this morning's agreement, in transferring the core elements of the CAP, and laying down a new direction for its future evolution." And this is not just a Government view. The Press Association has called this "the biggest shake-up ever in European agriculture". The BBC has referred to it as "radical". Even Le Monde talks of the proposed changes presaging an "agricultural revolution"!

This also sets an excellent precedent for the further wave of CAP reform due later this year on olive oil, tobacco, fruit and vegetables and, most importantly of all for developing countries, on sugar.

Particularly significant, is the decision to decouple CAP direct payments from production. Farmers will now be free to tailor their production to market demands and not be forced to produce a specific amount in order to receive subsidy, with all the inherent damage and distortion that creates. Damage and distortion that has had a negative impact not only on our farmers here in the UK, but more importantly on developing country farmers struggling to survive, who have found their markets flooded with our excess production.

This deal will enable the EU not only to meet, but to better, the domestic support targets that have been proposed in the WTO negotiations. Our trading partners must recognise the scale and importance of this change and respond by putting their own houses in order. That way the whole world will be a winner at Cancun.

So, instead of trying to fight against globalisation, we must seize the opportunity we have at Cancun, less than 50 working days away, and make sure we get a deal that is good for Britain and good for the developing world.
Because it is only by having prosperity around the world that we'll have security around the world.

We will push the WTO as hard as we can to get an agreement that works for developing countries and their future prosperity. And I say now, as the leader of the UK delegation to the WTO, that we will not accept or agree to any trade proposal that will damage the prospects of developing countries trading themselves out of poverty. We are not in these trade negotiations merely to promote UK plc. We are doing it because it's right. We will act even if there is no direct benefit to the UK, although, the reality is that we will all benefit from the increase in markets that comes from the rise in global prosperity.

The time has passed when richer countries could use trade negotiations to increase their profits at the expense of the developing world. We need to act in the interests of the whole world. It'll be good for all of us. It'll be, particularly, good for women. Growth in textiles and clothing trade has boosted jobs, financial power and equality for women across the world. Particularly in Asia, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Phillipines and Sri Lanka.

During the clothing export boom, Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world, saw it's urban poverty drop by almost a third. Mostly lifting women out of poverty. From 1989 to 1999, exports of cut flowers from Zimbabwe rose by more than 600%. And more than 8 out of 10 workers in the cut flower industry are women.

Of course trade liberalisation on it's own is not enough. Women need better legal rights, property rights, access to credit and a greater political voice as well. Only 7 to 11% of bank clients in Latin America and the Caribbean are women, although they tend to be better at repaying loans! And women hold only 13% of the world's parliamentary seats. I've been spearheading efforts to make sure women are well represented in the reconstructed Iraq.

We're less than 50 working days from Cancun. This is the opportunity for change.

We look across the Atlantic to America, the Channel to Europe and we are connected by history of Empire and Commonwealth to countries all around the globe. We have backing around us, with the majority of the 146 members of the WTO embracing change. We have the backing behind us, from business, NGOs, unions, consumer and women's groups.

It's a huge prize.

If we halved trade barriers, we would raise developing country incomes by $150 billion a year and lift 300 million people out of poverty.

Let's grasp it.