11 February 2005 - UK trade and development policy is making poverty inevitable, according to a report published this week by Indian trade activist Vandana Shiva, Green Euro-MP Caroline Lucas and economist Colin Hines.

Government claims to support the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign are simply misleading voters, say Shiva and Lucas, since they bear no relation to the real effects of British trade and aid policy.

“Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are misleading the British public when they assert that free trade and open markets enable the poor to export their way to prosperity,” said Dr Lucas, a member of the European Parliament’s International Trade Committee and an EU delegate to the WTO ministerial meetings in Seattle, Doha and Cancun.

“As the UN’s most recent report on least-developed countries makes clear ‘…even where the least developed countries have increased their overall export growth rate… better export performance rarely translates into sustained and substantial poverty reduction’.”

Vandana Shiva, recently described as one of the most powerful five people in Asia by Asia Week Magazine, said the UK-backed trade policies – and in particular ‘hi-tech agricultural export zones’ that would have pushed tens of millions of Indian farmers off the land – had been roundly rejected in last year’s Indian general election.

“The free trade poison being peddled by the UK and other rich nations and policed by the WTO is being forced on the rural majority despite their overwhelming rejection in the election, this time by laws sneaked out by the Indian government on Boxing Day – when everyone’s attention was on the tsunami disaster,” she said.

“The Indian rural masses are not taking this lying down and have already begum fighting back with a national non-co-operation campaign similar to that successfully used by Gandhi against the British in the last century”.

The report says the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign should focus on the poverty caused by free trade and demand fair trade based where necessary on border restrictions and protective quotas to ensure international trade benefits the majority.