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Free trade seen as anti-poverty
key
By Marwaan
Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - Asian governments should
embrace the global free trade system as a way to lift
the region's millions out of abject poverty, and it is
essential they end agricultural subsidies, senior
development officials told a high-level conference.
Any cooperation among countries across Asia
"should pay particular attention to activities that
would help achieve the immense potentials for fair trade
expansion unleashed by the Uruguay Round Agreements and
the establishment of the WTO" (World Trade
Organization), said Jacques Diouf, head of the United
Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Diouf's appeal, made Monday at the opening of a
two-day meeting here to address poverty and food
insecurity in Asia and the Pacific, was echoed by a
senior official from the Manila-based Asian Development
Bank (ADB).
"The establishment of an open and
non-discriminatory trading system would bring massive
benefits to developing economies, and accelerate their
progress in reducing poverty," said G H P B van der
Linden, vice president of the ADB.
At the same
time, governments must throw their weight behind
developing the region's rural agriculture sector, Diouf
added, since the face of poverty in Asia is largely a
rural one.
"Achieving the Millennium Development
Goals with respect to the eradication of extreme poverty
and hunger critically depends on the allocation of
adequate resources for these sectors," he told the
participants, who included ministers of agriculture,
parliamentarians, agriculture policymakers and senior
bureaucrats from 14 Asia-Pacific countries.
The
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a set of eight
specific targets government leaders agreed to achieve at
the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000.
The
first goal was to halve by 2015 the number of people
living on less than US$1 a day and to halve by the same
year the number of people who suffer from hunger.
According to ADB's van der Linden, the
experience of four Asian countries - China, India,
Thailand and Vietnam - reveals that poverty is a
challenge that can be overcome if states pursue
"sustained pro-poor" policies.
Among them are
investments in infrastructure to provide the ideal
conditions for growth, he said. "Even before the [1997]
Asian financial crisis, only about 4 percent of GDP
[gross domestic product] was allocated for
infrastructure against a required 6-7 percent. Following
the crisis, the investment levels have dropped."
The worries over poverty come at a time when
Asia is showing a mixed record in filling the stomachs
of region's underclass. Background papers distributed at
the meeting revealed that between 1990 and 2002, poverty
in the region slid from 34 percent of the region's
population to 24 percent.
China was a key
contributor to such an achievement, stated a paper by
Raj Kumar, head of the poverty and development division
at the Bangkok-based UN Economic and Social Commission
for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).
"Besides
China, the most successful cases of poverty reduction in
recent years can be found in Southeast Asia," it added.
"All countries in this subregion reduced the proportion
of people living on less that US$1 a day, with Indonesia
and Vietnam having the more remarkable progress."
However, Asia's ballooning poverty figures
reveal that there is little cause for comfort, since an
estimated 768 million of the world's approximately 1.2
billion people who live in poverty are in the
Asia-Pacific region. Furthermore, one in six people in
the region suffers from hunger.
And as Kumar
points out, it continues to be a largely rural
phenomenon, affecting the agricultural sectors, with
Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and the
Philippines being typical examples.
In
Bangladesh, for instance, rural poverty hovers around 37
percent in comparison to 19 percent in urban areas,
while in Cambodia there is 40 percent rural poverty as
opposed to 21 percent in urban centers and in Indonesia
rural poverty stands at 20 percent to the 15 percent in
urban areas.
The Philippines, however, has the
widest margin, with rural poverty at 48 percent to the
18 percent urban poverty.
But development
experts at the meeting said the WTO will only be an
effective ally to such a sizable number of poor if the
reforms of the international trading system are
achieved.
Foremost in this regard are the high
subsidies dished out by the developed world to their
respective agriculture sectors. According to the 2003
Human Development Report published by the UN Development
Program (UNDP), developed countries pump in an estimated
$311 billion annually in subsidies to aid their domestic
food producers.
"These subsidies are so large
that they affect world market prices of agricultural
goods, causing direct harm to poor countries," the
report said. The funds pumped into the dairy sector are
a typical example. In the European Union, each cow was
subsidized to the tune of $913, while Japan set aside
$2,700 per cow.
Currently, attempts to overhaul
this unequal economic terrain have made little headway,
with governments in the EU and the United States still
cold to the idea of taking decisive measures to end
schemes that protect their agriculture sectors.
Trade negotiations at the WTO meeting collapsed
last year in the Mexican resort town of Cancun because
of the impasse over the industrialized world's
agriculture subsidies.
"If there is a level
playing field, the rural poor stand to gain, since their
products will be more competitive," said Saifullah
Seyed, senior policy officer of the FAO's Asia-Pacific
office. "That will help reduce the large number of rural
poor in the region."
(Inter Press
Service)
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