wfn.org | Church World Service Says Concerns of Poor Nations *Pushed

["Lesley Crosson" <lcrosson@churchworldservice.org>]

Church World Service Says Concerns of Poor Nations "Pushed Aside" by WTO:
No Agreement Better Than a Bad One?

NEW YORK, Dec. 14--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 is cooperative global, relief, and refugee assistance
agency supported by Protestant, Orthodox and Anglican denominations in the
U.S.

Media Contacts
Lesley Crosson, (212) 870-2676, lcrosson@churchworldservice.org
Jan Dragin - 24/7 - (781) 925-1526, jdragin@gis.net

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