December 14, 2005

NEW YORK – The global development agency Church World Service today said that the concerns of most developing countries are being "pushed aside" by the World Trade Organization in favor of further advantages for affluent countries.

The Rev. John McCullough, executive director and chief executive officer of CWS decried the "growing inequality" between rich nations and poor nations and said "it violates the bonds of human community when billions of our fellow human beings are marginalized, oppressed, and nearly crushed under an intolerable weight of hunger, poverty, disease, and hopelessness."

The December 13-18 WTO meeting was supposed to be of special benefit to developing countries. Instead, Church World Service says, wealthy countries have aggressively pursued their own narrow self-interest, to the detriment of countries with large impoverished populations."

Church World Service, with its agency focus on justice and the eradication of hunger and poverty, has been openly critical of the United States position in the current WTO talks. Fairness, the agency believes, demands that developing countries be allowed to retain the same powers affluent nations now enjoy to protect and support their own small farmers and infant industries. Protection of small-holder farming is essential to food security in the Global South, where the majority of people are dependent on rural agriculture.

Fairness demands that the U.S. stop insisting that developing nations allow rich nations to flood their markets with subsidized produce.

CWS calls on the U.S. to end farm subsidies that allow exported U.S. goods to unfairly force down the prices of cotton and basic grains such as corn and rice, thereby bankrupting small farmers and devastating rural employment in developing countries.

The United States has failed to make serious offers on any of these things. Instead, the U.S. government and the European Union are aggressively pushing developing countries to widely open their markets to U.S. and European farm and non-farm products, as well as to service providers such as banking, telecommunications and water. At the same time, they are resisting calls to substantially reduce their own harmful agricultural subsidies.

At this point in time, prospects for a meaningful agreement Hong Kong are poor, with the U.S. and Europe unable to reach agreement between themselves, let alone meet the just demands of developing countries. That refusal to incorporate the valid concerns of poor nations into any new trade agreement precludes any possibility for a just agreement and prompts CWS to conclude that unless the U.S. and Europe change direction, the wise course, at this point, is to slow down the rush to a trade agreement.

"It is our hope that the U.S. government and other affluent countries change their positions in these negotiations. But it would be better for the Hong Kong meeting and subsequent WTO negotiations to fail than to reach a bad agreement that further harms impoverished people throughout the world," says Rajyashri Waghray, the agency's director of education and advocacy.

Church World Service has long been an advocate for trade justice. Most recently, in July 2005, following passage of the hotly-contested Central America Free Trade Agreement, McCullough called congressional approval of the measure "a serious blow to hopes of ordinary people in both the United States and Central America," – and vowed that CWS would keep fighting "to ensure that trade agreements are consistent with the moral values of fairness, justice and the common good."

The struggle continues with a Church World Service action alert [http://capwiz.com/churchworld/issues/alert/?alertid=8301006&type=CO] asking concerned citizens to contact their lawmakers in Washington this week and urge them to ensure that the U.S. lives up to its public commitment to authentic development at the WTO meeting.

Waghray vows that CWS will further strengthen its solidarity with suffering people by continuing to push for "fairness and economic justice for impoverished people" in the developing nations of the world.

Church World Service