Fair deal for fair trade

PLATFORM: OVER THE past few weeks, we have been applauding the remarkable public success of the Fairtrade brand here, writes Feargal Quinn.

Fairtrade in this sense aims to create a situation in which the producers of certain goods in developing countries get a fair price for their work, and the resulting products are sold under the Faitrade label in developed countries such as our own.

The invitation to customers is to pay a premium price for these products, in return for the assurance that the original producers get a better deal.

This started out with coffee and has since extended to a fairly broad range of products.

But this is not the whole story of "fair trade". The success of Fairtrade, which I have applauded since its beginning more than a decade ago, masks a much wider problem - that the world trading system is systemically opposed to the notion of fair trading between the developing countries and the developed world across the whole field of agriculture.

This is the conundrum the World Trade Organisation has been struggling to resolve for many years now, and it is what the present Doha round of trade talks are all about.

Put simply, the developed world - most notably Europe and America - is highly protectionist in regard to agriculture. To protect the narrow interests of its own farmers, it has tried to keep out produce from the developing world. Even worse, by flooding world markets with its surplus products at subsidised prices, it has depressed the market for the products of the developing world.

For anyone who regards all human beings as equal, this market behaviour is simply wrong. It is morally reprehensible and cannot be defended on any basis but pure national selfishness.

I have said many times in the Seanad that this behaviour makes me ashamed to be an Irishman and ashamed to be a European.

In this regard, we are the evil-doers and our policy should be to end this evil as quickly as possible.

It makes me particularly sad that Ireland is among the most active players in the European Union when it comes to agricultural protectionism. We and the French make up the unholy alliance that drives EU policy on world trade; we are the ones primarily responsible for trying to defend the indefensible.

What is particularly ironic is that the same developed countries most actively protectionist on agriculture are also the most generous as donors of development aid. Yet it has been calculated that all our development aid is of less value to the developing countries than they would gain from a truly fair world trading system. "Trade, not aid" is a slogan that seeks to encapsulate this irony and, in my view, it does it very well.

Let me stress that I am not arguing against the interests of farmers in pleading for a fair world trade deal, but the farmers are our problem or, if not, they are a European problem. We should not expect the developing world to bear whatever costs are involved in looking after our farmers.

In particular, we should not allow our farmers to dictate a morally reprehensible trade policy to the whole of our State.

Our spending on development aid - which does Ireland considerable credit - is a mask for an overall trade policy that is nothing to be proud of; in fact, it is one we should be thoroughly ashamed of.

The success of the Fairtrade movement should not blind us to the fact that, in terms of overall trade policy, this State is effectively an opponent of fair trade, not a supporter.

It would be a tragedy if the many good people who deliberately buy Fairtrade products for the best possible reasons were fooled into thinking that our national policies share and reflect their views. Unfortunately, they don't.

Feargal Quinn is an Independent member of Seanad Éireann