British Prime Minister Tony Blair joins a dozen like-minded leaders at a game lodge in South Africa at the weekend to discuss ways to push for fairer trade rules and advance their shared agenda.
Trade will be a key topic at the Progressive Governance Summit opening on Saturday in Hammanskraal, north of Pretoria, with World Trade Organisation director Pascal Lamy and European Union Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson taking part in the gathering.
At the request of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, leaders are to hold a special session to follow up on the WTO meeting in Hong Kong that outlined steps to tear down trade barriers and end farm subsidies, one of the toughest issues on the international trade agenda.
”The summit will assess whether it’s time to make this trade issue a political issue, which means to take a different position from other groups, to take a political progressive stand,” said Mojanku Gumbi, a top adviser to President Thabo Mbeki.
Prospects for reaching a trade deal that would open up rich markets to poorer countries have recently brightened with Lamy citing progress.
”It’s fair to say that the atmospherics have changed from dark before Hong Kong, to cloudy before Davos, to misty now, and hoping that we’ll get some sunshine before the end of April,” said Lamy in Geneva on Tuesday.
Brazil has allied itself with South Africa and India to try to wring concessions from the European Union and the United States on trade, in particular on agriculture, seen as key to combating poverty.
The summit marks the seventh gathering of centre-left leaders since the club was created in 1999 by Blair and former United States president Bill Clinton.
Initially formed as a link between European and American social democrats, the club has brought in other leaders and the Hammanskraal summit is the first to be held in the developing world.
While Clinton will not be attending this summit, Lula and Blair will be joined by New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and her Swedish counterpart Goeran Persson among others.
Since the last summit in October 2004 in Balatonoszod, Hungary, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was voted out of office but Blair secured a historic third term in elections in May. Republican US President George Bush was reelected to a second term in November 2004.
”There has been a slight swing away from progressives” over the past five years, said Matt Browne, director of the London-based Progressive Governance Network thinktank.
Browne attributes the shift to the post-September 11 world order that favoured the ”simplistic, visceral” reaction of rightist governments to security.
”People are coming back to progressives and at the same time we need to develop a new agenda to respond more directly to these fears,” he said.
Current members of the progressive club include Argentina, Brazil, Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Chile, Ethiopia, Hungary, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Spain and Sweden. – AFP
