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World Trade (Doha Development Agenda)

As the Chairman of our Committee said in introducing the report and as other hon. Members have said, things have moved on since it was presented in April. The negotiations have been broken off and elections are looming in America. Moreover, as my hon. Friend the Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) said, there is also an economic factor. To pick up on some of the remarks made by the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow), the economic context in the west is worsening. Hon. Members may have seen an article in the financial press yesterday stating that wheat prices in the US have hit"““a 10-year high…on fears of a further decline in global wheat production””" at a time when stockpiles are at a 20-year low. The article continues:"““The latest rise is expected to lead to higher food prices, affecting bread, breakfast cereals, pizzas and pasta””" throughout the western world in the next 12 months. I read that out simply because there is a debate on climate change on the Floor of the House and because there is now pressure on food prices following the failed harvest in Australia and drought elsewhere. Who will pay the highest price in that worsening context? As ever, it will be the poor of Africa. They will not get a chance to catch up as wheat prices increase and the rest of us scrabble to keep our heads above water. Since the 1970s, when pressure built up for aid, and the 0.7 per cent. target was first established, it has always been recognised that the real key to development would be fairer trade, not aid. There was a wonderful cartoon of a Mexican peasant facing a well-dressed business man who was holding a teaspoon out to him with the word ““aid”” written on it. However, the business man’s other hand was round the peasant’s windpipe and emblazoned on his arm was the word ““trade””. That has ever been the situation: a little teaspoon of aid cannot make up for the stranglehold on the windpipe of international trade. We should not resile, therefore, from insisting that trade and development go together, even if that seems to move back from an international agenda. Over the past few years, there has been real progress on aid and debt cancellation, not least by this Labour Government. However, all the pressure that built up around the immensely popular Make Poverty History campaign, with the focus shifting to trade justice, is in danger of evaporating, not only because of the complexity of the issue, but because of the disillusionment about the Doha round. Following the second world war, and even before globalisation became a major economic theme, it was generally recognised that there was a need for an international, multilateral, rules-based trading system, and that was the whole point of the general agreement on tariffs and trade. In 1995 the World Trade Organisation was set up. Encouragingly, it shifted the focus a little later by suggesting that we work towards establishing trade rules that worked for the benefit of those who were locked out of the economic system—the world’s poor. It set out on purpose to enable poorer countries and their peoples to break into the dominant world economic trading system. However, the rounds of talks, as we have debated endlessly in parliamentary Question Time, have repeatedly broken down. They have become enmeshed in the most incomprehensible arguments about intellectual property rights, investment measures and special product exemptions, and everything has been buried under complex acronyms, such as NAMA—non-agricultural market access—and the rest of them. Those of us who pay attention to the detail get stuck into the debate, but such problems are leading to increased disillusionment in the outside world, with people wondering whether the talks can ever deliver any change or justice for the poor. That generates disillusionment among those of good will, who believe in building, not an anything-goes free trade system, but a fair-trade, rules-based system that would at last be weighted in such a way as to deliver basic economic justice to poor people and their countries. There is now despair that that cannot possibly happen. As a result, we will lose all the pressure that built up around the Make Poverty History campaign, and people will believe that politics cannot change the world and nothing can be done. There is therefore some onus on us as politicians, on Governments and on international bodies to tackle the agenda before us, even at this late stage. The Doha round is in suspension and is proving to be the most deeply disillusioning round of all time. It is not only blocking development progress, but making things worse by leaving a vacuum. Into that vacuum will move the bilateral agreements, which will increase inequality between the powerful and the poor trading countries. During the development rounds, we talked about the limited negotiating capacity of the poorer countries, but that problem will be magnified in bilateral negotiations, when those countries will try simply to negotiate on a product-by-product basis. They will have no chance at all of getting a fair deal. ““Bilateral”” will mean that the poor will get poorer. In general it is recognised that poorer countries lost ground in the last negotiating rounds. Since 1994 the world trading system has reinforced the position, reach and access of the powerful, not the poor. Things have gone the other way. Deadline after deadline has passed and the Doha round has shown no sign of a development breakthrough.