President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda sent The Wall Street Journal an impassioned plea for trade from developed nations rather than aid, saying taxpayers in those nations paid twice for development assistance.
Keeping the developed world dependent on handouts, Museveni said in a letter published on Thursday, “is a recipe for permanent poverty.”
“The only way we can break out of this vicious cycle is through trade and export-led growth,” said the Ugandan president, who on Monday spoke before the UN General Assembly.
He called on developed nations to “scale back the agricultural subsidies and overproduction which depress world prices and close rich country markets to Africa’s rural majority.”
The European Union, he said, was one of the worst offenders, noting that the practice of dumping commodities at a fraction of what they cost to grow was also a bad policy for the rich nations’ farmers and for the broader economy.
He quoted a study by the Centre for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University, which pointed to a paradox: “rich-country taxpayers ‘are paying twice for development assistance: once to reduce the incomes of poor farmers and again to alleviate the same poverty.'”
Museveni regretted the failure of the last round of talks of the World Trade Organisation at Cancun, Mexico, saying that “we Africans could have done more to keep the negotiations on track”.
He said Africans should have supported US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick’s “bold proposal on agriculture … instead of allowing it to be watered down to satisfy the EU.”
He urged that trade issues be resolved within the WTO framework.
“As rich countries right their policies, prices at the farm gate will increase, causing incomes in developing countries to rise and creating new markets and investment opportunities for US business. Isn’t that a better way to promote development in Africa?”
WTO ministers gathered in Cancun, Mexico in September in a bid to breathe life into moribund trade-liberalisation talks that were launched in the Qatari capital of Doha on November 2001 and were due to conclude by January 1, 2005.
But the meeting collapsed after bickering over cross-border investment and competition added to a more fundamental dispute about farm subsidies in richer states and the high tariffs on agriculture imports from developing nations.
Delegates to Cancun nonetheless agreed on a December 15 target for a consensus on how to revive the Doha round. – AFP