Pre-European election activism

War on Want are running a campaign to encourage voters to lobby their local candidate for the European parliament on the subject of the EU’s trade politics. Their template looks like this:

I am writing to you as a constituent deeply concerned that European trade policies are exacerbating poverty and misery across the world. I would like to see a major change in the EU’s approach to international trade, so that it puts the needs and rights of poor people before commercial advantage for European companies.

As such, I want to vote for a candidate that will take action to help bring about a full-scale rethink of the EU’s trade policy and to ensure that it prioritises development, environmental sustainability and human rights in the world’s poorest countries. Please sign the pledge below to show your commitment to take action.

“If elected as a Member of the European Parliament in June 2009, I pledge to undertake some or all of the following activities:

• Write to the Trade Commissioner Baroness Ashton, and to the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, urging them to commit to a rethink before the end of 2009.
• Demand a cross-committee investigation in the European Parliament of the development, environment and human rights impacts of EU trade policies in developing countries.
• Sign a resolution in the European Parliament in support of a rethink of the EU’s trade strategy and policies.
• In Autumn 2009, actively participate in scrutiny of the new European Commission and its trade and development strategies.
• Write to the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso and to the Commissioner of Administrative Affairs, Audit and Anti-Fraud, Siim Kallas, to call for a mandatory register of lobbyists.”

Aside from the manifest righteousness of the cause itself, it is pleasing to see an NGO asking its supporters to do something more than just sign an electronic petition. War on Want’s campaign is asking us to enagage in some real interaction with our (would-be) elected representatives. That’s how it’s meant to work in a democratic society. More of this sort of thing, please!

The new transatlantic dialogue, trade wars, China and the IMF

I’m currently snowed under with work (Czechoslovakian democratisation, the prognosis for US hegemony, miscellaneous presentations and dissertation planning, since you ask), so apologies for the lack of posts. Things should even out from the beginning of June. In the meantime, there’s a few things I’d like to flag up.

• The Friedrich Naumann Stiftung für die Freiheit is running another online conference, this time on ‘The New Transatlantic Dialogue’. It is ongoing until 16 May and looks sure to be informative and useful.
• The epic beef-hormone conflict looks like it is coming to an end, while the nascent cheese war seems to have been nipped in the bud too.
• The Financial Times has an interesting profile of President Obama’s trade brinkmanship.
• The Guardian’s business section on Monday contained the headline ‘Europe accused of protectionism‘.
• The Catholic Times reports that ‘Pope accused of Catholic leanings’.
• Ngaire Woods discusses the influence of China on Bretton Woods reform.

EU’s €1bn budgetary surplus – where to spend it

Given that I failed to write yesterday (Blog Action Day) and may well fail to write tomorrow (International Day for the Eradication of Poverty) and that today is World Food Day, it seems like a good time to take some (blog-based) action on food and poverty.

My friend Alex at Global Justice: Tipping the Scales emailed me about this petition from the anti-poverty campaigning organisation ONE. Apparently, the EU has a billion euro surplus from this year’s budget. Now some would say that this money should be saved up for when the Union needs it, perhaps in some kind of financial crisis… Others will say that it should be returned to citizens who had to contribute towards it in their taxes. But, given the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy and its malign impact on food supplies and poverty, there is a certain justice in the idea that it ought to be spent on ‘additional development assistance’ for African farmers. If anyone should be told this, it’s President Sarkozy (see my previous post on Sarkozy’s attitude as regards European agriculture). So, in the same of arbitrary international observances days (all of them), get yourself to ONE.org and sign the petition.

WTO mini-ministerial update: some reactions

Timothy Wise and Kevin Gallagher write in the Guardian that “the proposals on the table [at the Doha Round negotiations] deserve to be sent back to the drawing board”. Their view is based on the World Bank’s projections of the benefits and costs of “a likely deal”, in which “global gains projected for 2015 are just $96bn, with only $16bn going to the developing world.”

I have some concerns about Wise and Gallagher’s assessment and one member of the public encapsulates them well, commenting that “it’s naive and misleading to assess the value of a trade deal on immediate tariff changes.” The article is, at the very least, guilty of oversimplification. There is more to the Doha Round than tariff adjustments and at any rate, those changes should be evaluated in the longer-term.

Meanwhile, at IPE Zone, Emmanuel Yujuico assesses (via Handel’s Messiah) a Washington Post op-ed which lauds Pascal Lamy as the “last hope for global free trade”. In contrast to Wise and Gallagher, the editorial believes that “at a time of rising food prices, a successful Doha round could add billions of dollars to the earning potential of farmers in the developing world”.

However, the IPE Zone post rightly takes issue with the paper’s somewhat bizarre assertion that “the vast majority of poor countries are on board for an agreement”. The article is a piece of opinion, not a work of academia, but I for one would have preferred some external reference or justification to back up this comment.

The piece also repeats the seemingly-widespread belief that the failure of Doha will inevitably result in the collapse of the WTO itself. One worries that such a claim, especially in the pages of a respectable newspaper, dangerously contributes to the potential for a classic case of the media-driven self-fulfilling prophecy.

Most disturbing of all is the report in the FT that Nicolas Sarkozy has declared his willingness to block negotiations, should they look like harming European agriculture. According to the FT, Sarkozy said that “in a world where there are 800m poor people who cannot satisfy their hunger and where a kid dies every 30 seconds from hunger, I will never accept a reduction in agricultural production on the altar of global liberalism”. Sarkozy believes that a deal later this month would result in the loss of 100,000 European jobs in farming.

The article is troubling for two reasons. Firstly, it wrongly describes Pascal Lamy as the WTO’s secretary-general. One would expect better from the Financial Times’ editorial staff. But more seriously, the French president’s grandstanding is irresponsible and cynical.

Despite his avowed concern for those 800 million in poverty, Sarkozy’s policy is to continue the subsidies that ensure poor farmers in the developing world cannot compete with richer agriculturalists in the developed world. Since European farmers cannot turn a profit in open competition and under the fairer conditions that a Doha deal would ensure, Sarkozy will do his best to scupper negotiations.

Sarkozy’s words are selfish nationalism disguised as humanitarianism. This is not about morality, nor about economics. It is pure politics, in the lowest sense of the word.

UPDATE: See Peter Mandelson on this topic (from BBC Newsnight).