The unfair trade practices of Europe and the United States has so far been the hottest issue under the spotlight for all groups of civil society, local and international, at the Jo’burg World Summit on Sustainable Development.
The issue is unlikely to be resolved at the end of the Summit. The northern countries have been subsidising farmers to the tune of R11-billion a day, ensuring that the playing fields are not levelled for fair trade with poor farmers of the south.
Running parallel to this issue of unfair trade is the issue of debt. South Africa is paying R17-billion a year in debt out of a total of R420-billion, it was announced by Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel this year. It is a spiral South Africa is digging itself deeper into, says Dennis Brutus, key leader in the Social Movements Indaba (SMI), which is running alternative to the mainstream Global People’s Forum.
But no country can succeed in ending these massive inequalities on its own, nor can the call for debt cancellation succeed unless strong alliances between the southern countries together with their allies in the north are formed, Brutus points out. There is a need for alliances between the southern countries on the issues of trade and debt cancellation, he says.
During the past week at Nasrec and outside the Sandton Convention Centre, civil society groups protested against the rich northern countries, which they say are maximising profits through trade liberalisation.
“Trade liberalisation is merely about opening up the economy so that poor countries can be exploited. Protections for poor countries have gone. For us, it means thousands of job losses,” says Trevor Ngwane, leader of the Anti-Privatisation Forum.
Although progress has been made at the Sandton Convention Centre talks on issues surrounding water, sanitation and fishing, the northern countries are avoiding the controversial issue of subsidies to their farmers.
At the centre of the crisis for South Africa and the other southern countries is the United States’s new Farm Bill and protective barriers for steel. While Minister of Trade and Industry Alec Erwin is hoping for a breakthrough at the summit on the issues of tariffs, lowering of trade barriers and the lowering of subsidies to farmers of the north, insiders at the Sandton Convention Centre talks say this is unlikely to happen.
Firstly, United States President George Bush isn’t attending the summit and secondly, even the World Trade Organisation is finding the European Union recalcitrant on the issue of trade and finance.
On the other side, civil society groups such as the SMI are putting the issue of unfair trade fully on their agenda and are calling for the complete dismantling of neo-liberal policies of governments of the day, which they say are further impoverishing people and the environment.
It is precisely Mbeki’s Growth Employment and Redistribution Strategy (Gear) together with the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) which is under fire from these groups.
The left-wing civil society groups say that while Gear and Nepad fully endorse trade liberalisation, they don’t take into account that the playing fields with “greedy” northern countries have not been levelled.