Christian leaders call for better deal for developing countries

27/09/07

Nineteen senior Church figures have joined forces to urge the Secretary of State for International Development to act to ensure that the world’s poorest countries are not forced into new trade agreements that will make them even less able to develop a healthy economy.

The leaders, including seven Church of England bishops, argue that current negotiations over a series of Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) – designed to determine future trade relations between Europe and Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP) – are set to seriously short-change the developing countries by offering what are essentially free trade agreements between unequal partners.

“These negotiations,” argue the leaders, “should result in trade agreements that help to bring about justice for some of the world’s poorest countries, but we are concerned that they currently threaten to undermine recent progress towards making poverty history.”

The Christian leaders’ call, spelt out in a letter sent to Douglas Alexander and printed in The Times, suggests that the EPAs “offer little flexibility to ACP countries, force them to open up their markets to unfair competition with the EU, and accept issues they have already rejected in other trade negotiations. The Commission is using the threat of loss of trade preferences if the deadline is missed, and is implicitly linking aid to signing EPAs, in order to extract all possible concessions during the negotiations.”

In March 2005, the UK government said that trade negotiations should not be used to force liberalisation on the ACP countries. However, Christian Aid, Tearfund and other aid charities point out that the government is alone in Europe in taking this moral stand – and has yet to do enough to back up its words with action.

The Rt Revd Michael Langrish, Bishop of Exeter, who leads the list of signatories to today’s public letter, comments:

“The European Commission is exerting considerable pressure on the ACP governments to sign these agreements, in spite of them voicing their repeated concerns about the impacts the agreements will have on their economies. This is a justice issue. We cannot stand by and allow the Commission to continue to insist on developing countries opening their markets to European imports, while denying them the right to protect their farmers and industries, or select their own trade policies. It’s time for the government to act on its promises.”