Make a Difference
for Poverty Reduction
at the Sixth WTO Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong
A CIDSE-Caritas Internationalis
Position Paper
June 2005

Table of contents
Executive summary 4
1. Support a pro-poor approach to trade 8
2. Give a clear priority to progress on agriculture 9
A priority for poverty eradication 9
A priority for securing livelihoods and fighting hunger 10
A priority for gender equity 11
The need for political will 12
3. Stop trade distortion that generates poverty 13
Stop trade liberalisation denying the liberties of the poor 13
Stop making the poor pay the cost of trade liberalisation 14
Stop dumping on developing countries’ markets 15
Stop trade-distorting supports 16
4. Promote agriculture and rural development working for poor people 19
Mainstream differential treatment to protect people in poverty 19
Protect rural development with Special Products 21
Protect food security with Special Safeguard Mechanisms 21
Open policy space for sustainable agriculture development 22
5. Summary of policy recommendations 26
Give a clear priority to progress on agriculture 26
Stop trade distortion that generates poverty 26
Promote agriculture and rural development working for poor people 26
CIDSE Members 28
Caritas Internationalis Members 30
3
Executive summary
4
1. Support a pro-poor approach
to trade
The daily work of organisations and
partners supporting women and men in
poverty in all the developing countries and
Catholic Social Teaching legitimate a
political perspective that makes human
dignity the priority for guiding international
trade rules. The following policy proposals
for poverty reduction and social justice aim
to contribute to shaping better trade rules
taking full consideration of their effects on
people in poverty, at the Sixth WTO
Ministerial Conference in Hong-Kong.
2. Give a clear priority to
progress on agriculture
A PRIORITY FOR POVERTY ERADICATION
Sustainable agricultural growth favours the
sector where the majority of people in
poverty work and the rural areas where they
live. Agriculture is not only crucial for smallscale
family producers but is also a key to
broader economic growth and sustainable
development in developing countries.
Therefore agriculture can have a powerful
impact on poverty reduction and in
achieving the Millennium Development
Goals. The skewed balance of power
between the 1.3 billion farms and
agricultural workers and the very few
international traders and large distributors
threatens livelihoods of farmers all over the
world.
A PRIORITY FOR DELIVERING LIVELIHOODS
Food security is one of the most prominent
features of agriculture. Most of the people
in poverty derive their food from outside
the commercial system. Therefore,
availability of food through imports as
promoted by the current Agreement on
Agriculture (AoA) of the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) is not sufficient to
address the food security concerns of
developing countries.
A PRIORITY FOR GENDER EQUITY
The contribution of women to agricultural
production, rural development and food
security in developing countries is not
properly valued or understood. Women
often suffer from severe gender biases
resulting from the current policy rules,
leaving them few opportunities for
sustainable development.
THE NEED FOR POLITICAL WILL
A more equitable, regulated system of trade
rules and negotiations should allow for a
model of agriculture that empowers the
poor to achieve food security in developing
countries. This implies a complete
reorientation of the WTO rules that are
currently seriously undermining human
dignity and human rights, disregarding the
commitments entered into under
international conventions by the Member
States. As a first step, the WTO should
endorse the UN Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs). Since the negotiations have
progressed rather slowly since the Doha
Ministerial Conference (2001), there is
indeed a need for a much stronger political
will to achieve real progress on agriculture
that makes trade work for development in
the world.
3. Stop trade distortion that
generates poverty
STOP TRADE LIBERALISATION DENYING THE
LIBERTIES OF THE POOR
International trade policies increasingly
have a direct and often deleterious effect on
the lives of the people in poverty, mainly
small-scale family farmers and rural
communities. The current AoA continues to
push developing countries to liberalise,
whilst taking no account of the large
reductions already made by them in the
past. Coherence between agriculture policy,
trade policy and development policy is also
lacking. Developing countries have been
pushed away from more sustainable policies
based on their local needs and capacities
towards an industrialised model of
agriculture that has jeopardised food
security in developing countries.
Furthermore, contrary to the fundamental
tenets of one country, one vote and
consensus, the negotiating and decisionmaking
practices within the WTO have
marginalised developing countries through
a non-inclusive and non-transparent
working process.
STOP MAKING THE POOR PAY THE COST OF TRADE
LIBERALISATION
Firstly, the request of the United States and
the European Union for substantial
progressive offers from developing
countries on industrial tariffs and services
does not take into account the high price
paid over the last thirty years by developing
country farmers suffering from the dumping
of agricultural goods produced by heavilysubsidised
agribusinesses in the developed
world for thirty years. Secondly, the
continued reduction of trade and
investment barriers is leading to the loss of
significant sources of revenue in developing
countries, at a time when developing
countries face rising debt burdens and
increasing social spending. Finally, nonreciprocal
trade preferences that were
benefiting developing countries are being
eroded by both regional and multilateral
liberalisation because of the overall
reductions in tariffs.
STOP DUMPING ON DEVELOPING COUNTRIES’
MARKETS
Dumping of Northern exports is preventing
developing country farmers from marketing
their production on their local or regional
markets at a fair, remunerative price. As it is
complicated for poorer countries to
demonstrate harm, importing countries
should have the ability to immediately
impose countervailing and anti-dumping
duties where goods are sold abroad for less
than the cost of production. Governments
should develop a more thorough and
transparent methodology to measure the
extent of dumping. In addition, Northern
countries should substantially reform their
agricultural subsidy regimes to ensure an
end to the dumping of products on global
markets.
STOP TRADE-DISTORTING SUPPORTS
Subsidies depress the price of agricultural
products on world markets. The WTO July
Package (2004) takes a very gradual approach
towards reforming subsidies on production
and exports which is unlikely to have a
significant impact. A clear frontloaded
schedule should be set up for eliminating all
export subsidies and support. The trade
distorting subsidies (Amber Box) should be
reduced according to a tiered formula.
Product-specific caps and reduction
commitments should be introduced by
establishing criteria to disaggregate direct
payments to farmers, partially de-coupled and
linked to production-limiting programmes
(Blue Box). A thorough review of the Green
Box (de-coupled and “minimally tradedistorting”
subsidies) is needed to ensure that
any remaining domestic support has minimal
trade-distorting effects and contributes to
public goods. Discipline is needed regarding
the Blue Box and Green Box, in order to
thwart “box shifting”. Developed countries
should commit to develop standard
harmonisation and to significantly reduce all
non-tariff trade barriers.
4. Promote agriculture and
rural development working
for poor people
MAINSTREAM DIFFERENTIAL TREATMENT TO
PROTECT PEOPLE IN POVERTY
Given the gap between the agriculture
systems in the North and in the majority of
developing countries, the same rules for all,
the rich and the poor, the powerful and the
weak, create new injustices. In order to allow
developing countries to set their own course
for growth, diversification and development,
Special and Differential Treatment must
constitute an integral part of all elements of
the trade agreements with a view to
preserving the food security, rural
development and livelihood concerns of
A CIDSE Caritas Internationalis Position Paper
5
millions of people who depend on the
agriculture sector in developing countries. For
developing countries whose tariffs are already
low, the tariff reduction must contain:
progressivity, proportionality and flexibility.
Given that de minimis support (support not
exceeding 10 per cent of the total value of
production) is the only form of support
available to farmers in most developing
countries, any attempt to reduce it should be
avoided. Moreover, the WTO Agreement on
agriculture should be rebalanced by
guaranteeing developing countries the right
to protect their borders by maintaining or
raising their agricultural tariffs and via
quantitative restrictions as long as Northern
subsidies remain. Finally, as there is no
possibility of a net positive outcome from the
current negotiation in the near future, Least
Developed Countries should be exempted
from any reduction commitments and should
receive not only duty-free and quota-free
access to richer countries’ markets, but also
support to strengthen their supply capacities.
PROTECT RURAL DEVELOPMENT WITH SPECIAL
PRODUCTS
Putting a brake on trade liberalisation by
exempting sensitive crops (Special Products)
from further tariff reductions can play a vital
role in increasing production and
productivity by small farmers, maintaining
and creating employment in the rural areas
and providing food security to people in
poverty. In accordance with its own
development needs, each developing
country should be allowed to select an
appropriate number of agricultural products
relevant for food and livelihood security and
sustainable rural development with
attention to specific gender needs. These
special products should be exempt from
further tariff reductions.
PROTECT FOOD SECURITY WITH SPECIAL
SAFEGUARD MECHANISMS
Special safeguard mechanisms should provide
flexibility to developing countries to protect
small farmers, including women, with such
mechanisms as removing food security crops
from tariff reduction commitments, or raising
tariffs, or imposing non tariff measures such
as quantitative restrictions. The existing
Special Safeguard Mechanism should be
replaced by another that is easier to use,
applicable for all products and available for all
developing countries to address import surges
and price volatility.
OPEN POLICY SPACE FOR SUSTAINABLE
AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
The current AoA embodies one of several
different models of agriculture. It favours
large-scale, industrial farming, and – for the
South in particular – significantly narrows
the choices that each country can make
about its own economic development. This
model of export-oriented economic growth
often tends to increase poverty and food
insecurity. Indeed, most poor rural producers
are simply unable to compete against richer
producers with much greater capacity and a
highly capitalised agriculture. Poor and
small-scale farmers depend mainly on the
functioning of local markets. Poverty of
peasants in developing countries is also the
result of the existence of an agricultural
price formation system which leads to a
decrease in these prices. Therefore, in order
to pursue policies that assure all residents a
basic standard of living, developing
countries need policy space, rather than
rigid and constricting trade rules which
constrain and shape the formulation of
domestic policy. Poor countries need the
right and the capacity to regulate trade and
investment in the interests of national
development, with the necessary protection
and gradual openness when the right
conditions are put in place. Price
stabilisation policies, and in some cases
supply management, may be useful tools for
developing countries to improve farm
incomes and food security. The challenge is
to develop models for sustainable
agriculture that strengthen public goods
(including food security) and create resilient
ecosystems and vibrant economies.
5. Summary of policy
recommendations
CIDSE and Caritas Internationalis call on the
Sixth WTO Ministerial Conference to give
real priority to a pro-poor perspective.
STOP DISTORTING TRADE THAT GENERATES
POVERTY
The WTO should endorse the UN Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) as its primary
commitment. The WTO negotiating process
Make a Difference for Poverty Reduction
6
must be more transparent and more
inclusive. Loss of revenue by developing
countries due to tariff cuts and preference
erosion in agriculture should be
compensated.
Northern countries should substantially
reform their agricultural subsidy regimes to
ensure an end to the dumping of products
on global markets. The importing
developing countries should have the
flexibility to impose additional duties on
subsidised imports. Members States have to
commit on short deadlines and processes to
eliminate all trade-distorting subsidies
(Amber Box) and all export subsidies.
Product-specific caps and reduction
commitments should be introduced for the
Blue Box payments. A thorough review of
the Green Box (de-coupled and “minimally
trade-distorting” subsidies) is needed to
reduce trade-distorting effects. The Green
Box should secure the livelihoods of small
farmers. Developed countries should commit
to significantly reducing all non-tariff trade
barriers.
PROMOTE AGRICULTURE AND RURAL
DEVELOPMENT WORKING FOR POOR PEOPLE
Special and Differential Treatment for
developing countries must constitute an
integral part of all elements of the
Agreement on Agriculture. The tariff
reduction for developing countries must be
progressive, proportional and flexible to
avoid negative impacts for small-scale
farmers. The AoA should also be rebalanced
by guaranteeing developing countries the
right to protect their borders by maintaining
tariffs or quantitative restrictions as long as
Northern subsidies remain. Least
Developed Countries need special
treatment (including duty-free and
quota-free access).
In accordance with its own needs for
food security and sustainable rural
development, with attention to specific
gender differences, each developing
country should be allowed to selfdesignate
an appropriate number of
Special Products to be exempted from
further tariff reductions. In the event of
a drop in prices or a significant increase
in the volume of imports, a Special
Safeguard Mechanism should provide
flexibility to developing countries to protect
small farmers. Open policy space should be
given to the developing countries to
develop national policies (price stabilisation,
supply management…) that protect and
promote sustainable agricultural practices.
A CIDSE Caritas Internationalis Position Paper
7
8
The daily struggles of women and men in
poverty around the world are calling for a
humanising transformation of the global
economy. There is an urgent need to strive
for the creation of international rules to
ensure the ability of a globalising world to
truly work for the global common good.
Catholic Social Teaching does acknowledge
the potentially positive role of the market
in the international economy1 but has also
always pointed out that today’s world
markets, including labour, trade and
financial markets, are dominated by the
realities of power. Agreements presented
as free contracts, and so as bearing the full
consequent obligations between trading
nations, are in reality shaped by unequal
power relations and therefore lack
legitimacy.2 Whatever claims are made in
favour of the markets, there are many
human needs which find no place on the
market.3 Political and international affairs
and the multiplicity of arrangements
which constitute the international
economic, social and political order need
to be ruled by moral values recognisable by
all people.4
The vulnerable and oppressed are agents of
change leading the struggle to eradicate
dehumanizing poverty, unacceptable living
and working conditions, and unjust social,
political, economic and cultural structures.
The daily work of organisations and
partners supporting people in poverty in all
the developing countries5 legitimates a
political perspective to fight poverty that
makes human dignity and social justice the
priority to guide international trade rules.
These positions are in accordance with two
principles of Catholic Social Teaching. The
principle of subsidiarity – where the
decisions that most affect peoples and
whole communities must be most influenced
by those peoples and communities. The
principle of the preferential option for the
poor – where the economic decisions must
start with a full consideration of their effects
on people in poverty.
The following policy proposals for poverty
reduction at the Sixth WTO Ministerial
Conference in Hong-Kong aim to contribute
to building a better world for people in
poverty and oppressed men, women and
children, providing a beacon of hope and
global solidarity and contributing to
changes and development of social justice.
1. Support a pro-poor approach
to trade
1 The goods of the earth are given by God to ‘the
whole human race for the sustenance of all its
members, without excluding or favouring anyone’
(Centesimus annus 31, 1991).
2 ‘When two parties are in very unequal positions,
their mutual consent does not guarantee a fair
contract. The rule of free consent remains
subservient to the demands of natural law.’
(Encyclic Populorum progressio, Nr. 59, 1967)
3 “The market [has to] be appropriately controlled
by the forces of society and by the state to ensure
that the basic needs of the whole society are
satisfied” (Centesimus Annus 1991, #35).
4 ‘With respect to States themselves, Our
predecessors have constantly taught, and We wish
to lend the weight of Our own authority to their
teaching, that nations are the subjects of reciprocal
rights and duties. Their relationships, therefore,
must likewise be harmonized in accordance with
the dictates of truth, justice, willing cooperation,
and freedom. The same law of nature that governs
the life and conduct of individuals must also
regulate the relations of political communities with
one another.’ (Encyclic Pacem in Terris, Nr. 80, 1963)
5 CIDSE (International Cooperation for Development
and Solidarity) is a coalition of 15 Catholic
development organisations in Europe and North
America working with two thousand partner
organisations in developing countries. Caritas
Internationalis is a confederation of 162 Catholic
relief, development and social service organisations
working to build a better world, especially
for the poor and oppressed, in over 200 countries
and territories.
9
A priority for poverty
eradication
There is an intimate relationship between
poverty and agriculture. Of the 1.2 billion
people worldwide living on less than a
dollar a day, 900 million live in rural areas
where agriculture remains the major means
of securing a livelihood.6 Agricultural
sustainable growth has a more powerful
impact on poverty reduction than any other
economic sector.7 Agriculture can and does
reduce poverty and inequality, making
specific contributions as measured by
progress towards achieving the Millennium
Development Goals.
Agricultural development favours the sector
where the majority of poor people work,
use the land and labour that they possess,
produce crops that they consume and
favours the rural areas where they live. It
generates employment, creates income, and
increases the ability of poor people to secure
and create further assets. In contrast to
industrialised economies, the majority of
agricultural products in developing
countries are grown, produced and
marketed by small-scale family producers.
Agriculture is the most important source of
employment in most of the poor countries.8
A 1 per cent increase in agricultural
productivity has been found to reduce the
proportion of people living on less than $­­1 a
day by 0.6-1.2 per cent.9
Not only can agriculture reduce poverty
directly, but it can also stimulate growth in
the wider economy, provided it is based
mainly on family producers. Family-based
agriculture is not only a key to both rural
and urban food security and to household
livelihoods but also to agriculture’s broader
contributions to economic growth and its
indirect linkages to poverty reduction and
sustainable development are often
overlooked in development policy
formulation. Agriculture contributes to
viable rural communities, enhances food
security, reduces rural and urban poverty,
promotes equitable and sustainable
development, and helps ensure social
stability, cultural continuity and rural
heritage. Studies have shown that a $­­1
increase in agricultural value added leads to
a $­­1.50-$­­2.00 increase in value added in the
non-farm economy. Similarly, a 1 per cent
increase in agricultural gross output has
been shown to raise rural non-farm
employment by 1 per cent.10
2. Give a clear priority to
progress on agriculture
6 IFAD, Achieving the MDGs by Enabling the Rural
Poor to Overcome their Poverty, (IFAD, Rome,
2003).
7 Hanmer, Lucia and David Booth Pro poor growth:
why do we need it, what does it mean and what
does it imply for policy?, (ODI, London, second draft
August 2001). See also Lipton, M. and M. Ravallion,
“Poverty and Policy” in Behrman and Srinivasan
(eds.) Handbook of Development Economics, Vol 3b
(North Holland, Amsterdam, 1995) Ravallion, M. and
G. Datt, When is Growth Pro-Poor? (Mimeograph,
World Bank, 2000); Timmer, C.P How well do the
poor connect to the growth process? (Harvard
Institute for International Development,
Cambridge, Mass, 1997).
8 In Africa, agriculture employs about two thirds of
the labour forces and accounts for 37% of the GNP
and one half of exports. World Development
Report 2000, World Bank.
9 Eastwood, Robert and Michael Lipton “Pro poor
growth and pro growth poverty reduction: what do
they mean? What does the evidence mean? What
can policymakers do?”, paper delivered at the Asia
and Pacific Forum on Poverty: Reforming Policies
and Institutions for Poverty Reduction, held at the
Asian Development Bank, Manila, 5-9 February
2001. The World Bank found that a 1 per cent
increase in agricultural GDP per capita led to a 1.6
percent gain in the income of the poorest fifth of
the countries analysed. See Timmer, C.P. (1997) How
well do the poor connect to the growth process?
(Harvard Institute for International Development,
Cambridge, Mass, 1997).
10 Hazell, P. and S. Haggblade “Farm-Nonfarm Growth
Linkages and the Welfare of the Poor” in van der
Gaag, J. and M. Lipton, (eds.), Including the Poor:
Proceedings of a Symposium Organized by the World
Bank and the International Food Policy Research
Institute (World Bank, Washington, DC, 1993).
Make a Difference for Poverty Reduction
10
Not everyone benefits from the
opportunities of increased trade – in many
cases the livelihoods of small-scale farmers
and agricultural labourers have worsened.11
Few people can benefit from international
agricultural trade because a handful of
companies dominate world markets. In 1986
it was estimated that 85-90% of global
agricultural trade was controlled by five
companies. Around 75% of the global
cereals trade is controlled by two
multinational companies. Approximately
50% of the world coffee supply comes from
small-scale farmers, 40% of the global
coffee trade is controlled by four
companies.12 Companies gain an increased
share of the market by consolidating and
acquiring production resources and by
extending their activities beyond simply
producing.
Transnational commodity traders and
processors, predominantly from developed
countries, have the means to invest in the
production, processing, transporting and
trading processes, giving them a massive
advantage over small-scale producers. The
balance of power is extremely skewed
between the 1.3 billion farms and
agricultural workers and the very few
international traders and large distributors.
Huge firms control the sale of chemicals and
seeds to farmers, grain purchasing and
processing, livestock production, and the
sale of food and other products to
consumers. Their market power enables
them to set prices at the expense of farmers
and consumers alike.13 For example, firms
sell US cotton on world markets at prices
close to 50 percent below what it costs to
produce. That cotton drives down the world
price for cotton, at the expense of growers
in some of the world’s poorest countries,
including Burkina Faso and Mali.
Transnational companies are more
interested in high sales volumes and in
keeping inputs cheap for their more
profitable livestock and grain processing
operations. This threatens livelihoods of
farmers all over the world, leaving them
either impoverished or dependent on
subsidies to earn a living.
A priority for securing
livelihoods and fighting hunger
Food security is one of the most prominent
features of agriculture’s multi-functionality.
Agriculture has ensured that global food
production has more than kept pace with
human population growth. Ninety percent
of the food produced in the world is
consumed within the country or region
producing it, and most of that usage lies
outside of the commercial system. On
average worldwide, poor people in rural
areas derive half of their household income
from farming.14 Agriculture supplies food
and primary commodities, lowers food
prices, provides surplus labour and capital,
and consumes non-farm production.
Availability of food through imports is not
sufficient to address the food security
concerns of developing countries as trade
liberalisers claim. According to the UN’s
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO),
food security is significantly strengthened if
increased per capita food availability is due
to increased domestic production rather
than imports. It has been well documented
that as a result of the implementation of the
World Trade Organisation (WTO)
Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) developing
countries’ agricultural imports have
increased faster than their exports. Sixteen
country case studies carried out by the FAO,
looking at the impact of the AoA, found
11 Smaller, Carin, Planting the right seed: a human
rights perspective on agriculture trade and the
WTO, 3D, Geneva, March 2005
12 Vorley, Bill, Food Inc. – Corporate concentration
from farmer to consumer, UK Food group, 2003.
13 Murphy, Sophia, Will the Doha Round play a role in
ending poverty ?, Au courant, p. 7-9, CCIC, 2005.
14 Better livelihoods for poor people, the role of
agriculture, DFID, 2002.
that food imports surged after
liberalisation.15
A priority for gender equity
“There will be no food security without rural
women” Jacques Diouf, FAO Director
General.16 It is difficult to overstate the
importance of women in developing country
agriculture. Women account for 70-80 per
cent of food grown in sub-Saharan Africa,
while in South and Southeast Asia, women
carry out 60 per cent of the work in
agriculture and food production. There is
also an increasing trend towards the
“feminisation of agriculture”, owing to
conflict, HIV/AIDS and rural-urban
migration. However, women also suffer
from severe gender biases. They have
unequal access to capital (notably credit),
legal and social ownership rights (land in
particular) and inequalities in access to
productive resources and services (including
agricultural extension services, training,
technology and market information).
Women’s higher rates of illiteracy lead to
exclusion from new market opportunities,
while women farmers are often neglected
by policy makers and their contribution to
agriculture is not properly valued or
understood.
These gender biases constrain women’s
ability to succeed in some sectors of
developing country agriculture. What has
been termed “gender exploitative
integration”17 limits women’s participation
in export-oriented agriculture, and also in
A CIDSE Caritas Internationalis Position Paper
11
According to the FAO, rural women are
responsible for half of the world’s food
production and have a prominent role in
agriculture at all levels, in home farm
production critical to household
maintenance as well as in commercial
agriculture mainly oriented to export
crops. They produce between 60 and 80
percent of the food in most developing
countries and are also the main producers
of the world’s staple crops – rice, wheat,
maize – which provide up to 90 percent of
the rural poor’s food intake. Women
contribute significantly to secondary crop
production, such as legumes and
vegetables, which provide essential
nutrients for their families and are often
the only food available during the lean
seasons or in case the main crops fails.
In India, agriculture and allied industrial
sectors employ as much as 89.5% of the
total female labor force. Women play a
crucial role in ensuring supplies of food
not only for household purposes, but also
as food vendors and post-harvest
processors of livestock and fishery
products. In Tanzania, ILO estimates that
women comprise 54% of those
economically active in agriculture. In
Honduras, rural women play an important
role in agriculture, especially in the
peasant and small farmers sectors, working
an average of four hours a day in crop and
livestock activities.18
“A common feature of women’s work in
the majority of rural areas of the
developing world is the underestimation
and lack of economic remuneration for
their work and contribution to household
and community maintenance, as well as to
the macroeconomic level. Women have
extensive work loads with dual
responsibility for farm and household
protection”.19
Women’s role in agriculture
15 See, FAO, Developing country experience with the
implementation of the Uruguay Round Agreement
on Agriculture: Synthesis of the findings of 23
country case studies. Paper presented in a
Symposium in Geneva on 2 October 2002.
16 FAO High-level Consultation on Rural Women and
Information
17 Hewitt de Alcántara, C., Real Markets: Social and
Political Issues of Food Policy Reform, (Frank Cass,
in association with EADI and UNRISD, London,
1993).
18 Hernández, María Pía, Incorporating Gender
Considerations for the Designation of Special
Products in WTO Agriculture negotiations, IGTN,
Geneva, March 2005.
19 Williams, Mariama, Gender mainstreaming in
multilateral trading system, A handbook for policymakers
and other stakeholders, Commonwealth
secretariat, 2003.
larger-scale – and more profitable – activities
(trading, marketing) in domestic agriculture.
Gender biases in turn often trap women in
low-productivity, low-growth economic
activities, leaving them few opportunities
other than home-based employment in lowtechnology
sectors.
The need for political will
Current global trade rules are biased against
poorer countries and poorer people.
Millions of people want to be able to trade
their way out of poverty. All they are lacking
is a fair chance to do so. Therefore, the rules
need to be changed to empower these
marginalised countries and communities to
develop their economies and trading
systems. A new system of trade rules should
place trade at the service of international
human rights, poverty eradication and
sustainable development. A more equitable
regulated system of trade rules and
negotiations would allow for a model of
agriculture that empowers the poor to
guarantee food security in developing
countries. This implies a complete
reorientation of the WTO towards a
stronger focus on development
The trade liberalisation agenda promoted
by the WTO is seriously undermining people
and their human rights.20 Accordingly,
Member States have to ensure that their
WTO commitments are not in conflict with
their human rights obligations. Member
States of the WTO should also respect and
abide by the international treaties that they
have ratified (including the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights, the UN Convention on the Rights of
the Child and the UN Convention on the
Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination
against Women) as guiding principles when
making trade policy. The FAO’s Right to
Food Guidelines provides practical guidance
for countries in implementing their
obligations related to the right to adequate
food.
In this context, the WTO itself should also
fully embrace the concept underwritten in
the Monterrey Consensus of trade as a step
forward for development. The WTO should
endorse the UN Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs) as its primary concrete
overarching objective, as the IMF and World
Bank have already done. It would provide a
framework in which to discuss trade impact
on people in poverty and which trade rules
would really benefit them.
Since the Doha Ministerial Conference
(November 2001), the focus of the
negotiations has been on devising a set of
‘modalities’21 that will determine the depth,
scope and speed of further trade
liberalisation in agricultural trade in
developed and developing countries. From
the start of the negotiations, developing
countries have stressed the importance of
the agricultural sector for their economic
development and for their economic, social
and political stability. The Framework
agreement approved on 1 August 2004 in
Geneva marked rather limited progress in
the negotiations. Even if it does not address
all the necessary issues, the Hong Kong
Ministerial should narrow its work to
reaching outcomes on the core issues
already under negotiation. The upcoming
series of discussions should not be
broadened to any “issue of interest but not
agreed”. There is a need for a much stronger
political will to go beyond the rhetoric and
to make real progress on agriculture that
makes trade work for development in the
world and provides policy space for concerns
other than trade.
Make a Difference for Poverty Reduction
12
20 3D, Planting the Rights Seed: A Human Rights
Perspective on Agriculture Trade and the WTO,
March 2005.
21 The term modalities refers to the numerical targets
for further commitments in the different areas of
disciplines established in the AoA during the
Uruguay Round and new trade rules under which
the new commitments will take place. The Doha
Ministerial Conference established a mandate for
the negotiations identifying specific objectives on
each of the pillars or areas of the negotiations –
market access, domestic support, and export
competition – and tight timelines for concluding
the negotiations.
Stop trade liberalisation denying
the liberties of the poor
Trade policies adopted at the international
level increasingly have a direct and often
deleterious effect on the lives of the poorest
of the poor. The globalisation of the market
economy takes shape regardless of its
influence on people’s lives. Due to trade
liberalisation, developing countries have
become more vulnerable to short-term
import surges, which can have devastating
and permanent impacts on small farmers
and rural communities. This sets off what
the FAO describes as “a progressive
pauperisation of small-scale farmers, who
cannot possibly compete with modern
capitalised farms in an increasingly open
world economy.”22
Many developing countries have already
undergone substantial trade liberalisation as
part of IMF and World Bank conditionality.
Liberalisation often occurred at a
breathtaking pace and depth, seemingly
promoted more by economic dogma than a
considered analysis of its probable impact
on poor people. Both Mozambique and
Zambia now have more open economies
than the UK and Germany, for example.23
The current WTO Agreement on Agriculture
(AoA) continues to push developing
countries to liberalise, whilst taking no
account of the large reductions already
made by them in the past.24 The AoA, as
currently constituted, pushes countries away
from more sustainable options towards an
industrialised model of agriculture that has
jeopardised food security in developing
countries by pursuing a capital and chemical
intensive form of production, geared to
exports from large farms rather than the
interests of small producers.
Coherence between agriculture policy, trade
policy and development policy is lacking:
one cannot pretend to support developing
countries’ agricultural development needs
while at the same time demanding these
countries open up their markets to
subsidised products from developed
countries as part of the EU Economic
Partnership Agreements (EPAs), US Free
Trade Agreements, through conditionality
imposed by the World Bank and the IMF or
through the WTO. This view of coherence
needs to be broadened to ensure that
countries do not enter into trade or financial
agreements that undermine their social
policies or their ability to meet their human
rights obligations including food security.
However, much greater emphasis is also
needed on developing countries’ domestic
policy needs – to increase productive
capacity, prioritise local and regional
markets, add value, tackle the commodity
crisis and diversify.
On paper, the WTO is the most democratic
of all the international institutions with a
global mandate. Each country has one voice
and all decisions are taken by consensus.
However the negotiating and decisionmaking
practices have marginalised
developing countries through non-inclusive
working methods, lack of transparency in
the negotiations, a proliferating number of
informal consultations… The use of
exclusive meetings (mini-Ministerial, green
room meetings…) the five interested parties
to build consensus among the few, which is
then presented to the majority, contradicts
the fundamental tenets of one country, one
vote and consensus. Reform of the
negotiating process is a pre-requisite for a
good development outcome of the Doha
Round as well as a vital factor for
legitimisation of the WTO.25
13
3. Stop trade distortion
that generates poverty
22 FAO, The State of Food and Agriculture 2000 (FAO,
Rome, 2000)
23 Based on the IMF’s Trade Restrictiveness Index (TRI)
from the IMF’s International Financial Statistics CD
Rom (1999).
24 See Sophia Murphy, Food Security and the WTO,
CIDSE, September 2001
25 See the policy proposals developed in “A hearing
in the WTO for all Members. Guidelines for
improving the WTO negotiating process”, CIDSECaritas
Internationalis, April 2005.
Stop making the poor pay the
cost of trade liberalisation
The United States and the European Union
have taken the position to subject any
progress on the pace and the content of
agricultural negotiations in which poor
people and countries have a major interest,
to a condition of substantial progressive
offers from developing countries on
industrial tariffs and services. This does not
take into account the fact that developing
countries have already paid a high price
suffering the dumping of agricultural goods
from the European Union and the United
States for thirty years.
While the AoA forces developing countries to
cut tariffs,26 which are in many cases their only
means of protecting their farmers, there are
numerous loopholes that allow rich countries
to continue to subsidise their own farmers,
enabling them to dump products on the
world market at less than the cost of
production. This fundamental imbalance
between North and South has meant that
developing country farmers (who constitute
97% of the world’s farm population) have
faced devastation as a result of liberalisationinduced
surges of imports, many of them
produced by heavily-subsidised agribusinesses
in the developed world.
With the public finances of many developing
and emerging market countries heavily
dependent on trade tax revenues, the
continued reduction of trade and investment
barriers championed by many development
experts and institutions is leading to the loss of
significant sources of revenue in developing
countries. This revenue loss as a consequence
of trade liberalisation comes at a time when
developing countries face rising debt burdens,
at best stagnant ODA, and the pressure to
increase social spending in order to achieve
the Millennium Development Goals.
Non-reciprocal trade preferences27 are of
importance to many developing countries.
They are being eroded by both regional and
multilateral liberalisation because of the
overall reductions in tariffs. Preference
erosion should be addressed in the
Make a Difference for Poverty Reduction
14
26 According to the Chairman’s text the depth of cuts
will depend on the level of the final bound rate
established during the Uruguay Round. Small and
poor countries such as Cuba, Honduras, and Sri
Lanka with tariffs at or below 50 per cent would be
required to reduce tariffs by 30 per cent on
average. Many African countries, whose tariffs
were bound at higher levels using tariff ceilings
(e.g. 100 per cent), will be required to reduce their
tariffs by 40 per cent on average
27 Almost all sub-Saharan African countries are
members of the African, Caribbean and Pacific
group of countries which, as former colonies of EU
member states, have enjoyed privileged access to
European markets. As the EU has extended trading
benefits to other developing countries, the value
of this privileged access has been eroded. This is
known as preference erosion.
Maize is Mexico’s principal crop and major
source of sustenance. Mexico is the
birthplace of maize and the country’s
history and culture revolve around the
crop. Since NAFTA, maize imports have
nearly tripled, and the price has dropped
64% since 1985.31 Genetically modified
maize imports have contaminated local
varieties, leading to fears of loss of
biodiversity and increasing dependency on
transnational seed and chemical
companies. Under NAFTA, the Mexican
countryside has lost 1.7 million jobs, with
little employment generation in other
sectors. Thousands of Mexicans migrated
to the US, many to work in agriculture as
undocumented workers without labour
guarantees or benefits. The potential
development outcomes of trade
liberalisation were destroyed by its other
consequences: increase of rural poverty,
malnutrition and migration; increased
workloads, particularly for women;
increased profits and market control by
transnational traders and processors at the
cost of small-holder farms; increased food
dependency and lost national revenues;
and severe risks to the environment and
biodiversity. De-agriculturalisation has led
to a loss of culture and the destruction of
the traditional fabric of society.
Mexico and agriculture
negotiations, in accordance with the
provisions of the ‘July Framework’, and
requires mainstreaming the development
dimension in the multilateral trading system
through (i) expanded market access for
products which are of vital export
importance to the preference beneficiaries;
(ii) effective utilisation of existing
preferences and (iii) additional financial
assistance and capacity building to address
supply constraints, promote diversification
and assist in adjustment and restructuring.28
Stop dumping on developing
countries’ markets
Agricultural products are considered
dumped when they are sold below their cost
of production. Dumping denies fair access
for developing country farmers to their own
markets.
Dumping of Northern exports is preventing
developing country farmers from marketing
their production on their local or regional
markets at a fair remunerative price.
The current WTO anti-dumping rules (mainly
art. 6 of the GATT) make it technically
complicated for poorer countries to establish
grounds for anti-dumping duties because of
the requirements to demonstrate harm to the
sector involved. It is also politically difficult
for a poor country to impose prohibitive
tariffs against a powerful country on which
most of its exports depend.29
Importing countries should have the ability
to immediately impose countervailing and
anti-dumping duties where goods are sold
abroad for less than the cost of production.
The linkage of the level of subsidies in
developed countries and the tariff
reductions should be undertaken by
developing countries. Through a so-called
balancing measure, the proposal would
provide the flexibility to importing
developing countries to impose additional
duties on subsidised imports by calculating a
subsidy-equivalent tariff.30
Annual full-cost-of-production estimates for
OECD countries should be published.
Governments should develop a more
thorough and transparent methodology to
measure the extent of dumping, and make
the relevant data publicly available in a
timely way.
A CIDSE Caritas Internationalis Position Paper
15
28 G20 New Delhi Declaration, March 2005,
http://www.agtradepolicy.org/output/resource/
G20_delhi_declaration.pdf
29 Sophia Murphy, Ben Lilliston, Mary Beth Lake, WTO
Agreement on Agriculture: A Decade of Dumping
– United States Dumping on Agricultural Markets,
Geneva, 2005.
30 See, for example, submission by the Philippines in
September 2002, WTO document JOB(02)/111
31 See Laura Carlsen, The Mexican Experience and
Lessons for WTO Negotiations on the Agreement
on Agriculture. Presentation at the European
Parliament, Brussels 11 June 2003
In addition, Northern countries should
substantially reform their agricultural
subsidy regimes to ensure an end to the
dumping of products on global markets. The
European Union and the United States
should focus agricultural reforms on
reducing overproduction and redressing the
disparity between millions of small-scale
producers and the few biggest agribusiness
companies that dominate agricultural
production and trade.
Stop trade-distorting supports
To redress the imbalances in the current
agreement, based on the unsatisfactory
results of the implementation of the AoA
and the negative impact to date of trade
liberalisation on food security, developing
country organisations have stressed the
need to significantly reduce or eliminate
trade distorting domestic support and
export subsidies in OECD countries before
further trade liberalisation is required from
them.
Subsidies depress the price of agricultural
products on world markets. The recent WTO
framework agreement reached in Geneva in
July 2004 is unlikely to lead either the US or
the European Union to undertake any
significant reform of their subsidy regimes.32
The July Package takes a very gradual
approach towards reforming subsidies on
production and exports. Moreover, while
the July Package set an initial 20 percent cut
in trade-distorting support during the first
year of implementation, the effect of this
cut is not significant due to the gaps
between countries’ allowed support bounds
and their actual support levels. In addition,
the proposed disciplines on export credits,
credit guarantees and insurance
programmes, as well as food aid, include
loopholes that undermine their
effectiveness, potentially allowing members
to elude their export subsidy reduction
commitments.
In order to reach the end objective of
eliminating dumping, the following steps
should be taken:
l All forms of export support should be
eliminated. A clear frontloaded
schedule should be set up for
eliminating export subsidies and
support.
l The trade distorting subsidies (Amber
Box) should be eliminated and
reductions should be made according to
a tiered formula, with higher levels of
support being cut more steeply
l Direct subsidies to farmers, partially decoupled
and linked to productionlimiting
programmes (Blue Box) should
see a substantial reduction. Productspecific
caps and reduction
commitments should be introduced by
establishing criteria to disaggregate
Blue Box payments at a product-specific
level. This would prevent shifts in
support among products or the
concentration of large amounts of
support in a few products. Price
linkages should be disciplined to ensure
that there is no incentive to increase
production. Although Blue Box
payments are granted under
production-limiting programmes, there
are no requirements for details as to
how these payments in fact limit
production. The need and importance
of improved monitoring and
surveillance provisions is clear.33
l The de-coupled or “minimally tradedistorting”
subsidies (Green Box) are
permitted subsidies including payments
Make a Difference for Poverty Reduction
16
32 See CAFOD “Analysis of the WTO Framework
Agreement” (CAFOD, London, 2004) and South
Centre “Detailed Analysis of Annex A to the
General Council Decision July 2004 ‘Framework for
Establishing Modalities in Agriculture’” (South
Centre, 2004)
33 G20 statement on the Blue Box, 15 March 2005: As
regards Blue Box payments which are not aimed at
limiting production, the G20 proposed the
following:
* No updating of base areas and yields: This
would reduce the incentive to farmers to
increase planted areas on the expectation that a
possible future updating would increase their
revenue received from the Government. As a
consequence, farmers would focus more on
market signals;
* Payments should be independent from what is
being produced: This proposed change is
intended to allow for a larger degree of
flexibility for the farmers to move away from
their original crops and even to withdraw land
from production;
* Accumulation of payments: If the Blue Box is a
half-way to reform, commodities benefiting
A CIDSE Caritas Internationalis Position Paper
17
“Cotton is everything for us – our
pharmacy, our hospital, our schools, our
children,” farmer Joseph Kabore tells
CIDSE visitors in his village, Limseyga, in
Burkina Faso. He has been growing cotton
since 1986. “In the beginning, cotton gave
us hope; but with the low market price
and the high cost of inputs, we can’t make
enough money to take care of our
families.” Declining world cotton prices
have dealt a severe blow to the livelihoods
of more than 2 million people in Burkina
Faso who depend on cotton. Despite
producing high quality cotton at low cost,
Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries
on earth, is finding itself undercut by the
strategy of the agrobusiness industry that
lowers prices to producers, and facing
heavily subsidised producers from the
richest countries in the world, that manage
to stand these low prices thanks to their
subsidies. The US is the world’s largest
exporter of cotton, accounting for 41 per
cent of world cotton exports in 2003. US
cotton farmers are relatively
uncompetitive, and are able to take such a
large share of the market only because of
lavish subsidies. In 2001/2002 the US spent
around $­­3.9 billion on cotton subsidies,
more than the entire gross domestic
product of Burkina Faso, and three times
the entire US bilateral aid budget for
Africa.34
While the elimination of cotton subsidies
would benefit all low-cost cotton
producers, West and Central African
countries – where more than 90 percent of
cotton is grown for export – are among
those that suffer most from the high level
of subsidisation in the sector. Over ten
million people in the region depend
directly on cotton production. Cotton
exports represent around 30 percent of
total export earnings and more than 60
percent of earnings from agricultural
exports. The International Cotton Advisory
Committee (ICAC) estimates at US$­­6 billion
the combined support granted to the
cotton sector by the US, the EU and China
in 2001/2002, which corresponds to total
world exports in that year. US cotton
subsidies alone exceed by 60 percent the
total GDP of Burkina Faso, where nearly
two million people depend on cotton
production. Nearly half of US support goes
to a few thousand growers with farms of
more than 1,000 acres, penalising West
and Central African farmers whose plots
average five acres and who live on less
than a dollar a day.35
But while defending poor cotton
producers of developing countries is very
important, this should not prevent all
countries’ efforts to get out of commodity
specialisation and crop monoculture, and
to enhance local and regional trade for
diversified family based food production
that would both address poverty reduction
and food needs, reduce the vulnerability
of developing countries on the world
market, and contribute to more
sustainable agricultural development.
The impact of Northern subsidies on cotton
from it should not be allowed to receive Amber
support;
* Setting criteria to determine target prices:
Target prices are currently fixed arbitrarily, which
creates an effectively permanent incentive for
farmers to continue to produce a specific crop,
insulating the farmer from market signals. A
good alternative could be loan rates fixed in
relation to a 5-year Olympic average, following
market price fluctuations;
* Limits to price-gaps differentials: Current WTO
agreement on agriculture (AoA) rules in terms of
direct payments limit the compensation for
farmers’ income loss due to natural disasters to
70%. It is proposed that a factor or reduction be
introduced to bring down the level of incomeloss
compensation due to normal market risks;
* Product specific caps: This would be a means of
preventing the shift of support among products
or the concentration of large amounts of support
in a few products.
34 CIDSE and Caritas Internationalis, Unfair Trade and
Cotton: Global Challenges, Local Challenges (CIDSE
and Caritas Internationalis, 2004)
35 This section is taken from Bridges, May 2003
linked to environmental programmes,
pest and disease control, infrastructure
development, and domestic food aid
(paid for at current market prices). The
Green Box also includes payments to
producers that are not linked to
changing levels of production (so-called
decoupled payments) and government
payments to income insurance
programmes. A thorough review of the
Green Box is needed to ensure that any
remaining domestic support has
minimal trade-distorting effects and
contributes to public goods such as
environmental protection and securing
the livelihoods of small farmers. In
addition, the Green Box should
accommodate development
programmes in developing countries.
Disciplines are needed on the Blue Box
and Green Box, in order to thwart “box
shifting.”
Subsidies to agriculture should be focused
on addressing development concerns for
family-based production and poverty
reduction.
Developed countries should address nontariff
trade barriers. For instance, The
Commission for Africa, established in 2004
by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in its
report issued on 11 March 2005, calls on
developed countries to ensure that
standards are not unnecessarily stringent
and to help Africa in meeting these
standards. It also urges rich countries to
explore standard harmonisation so that
African exporters are better able to identify
and meet such requirements.
Make a Difference for Poverty Reduction
18
A CIDSE Caritas Internationalis Position Paper
19
Mainstream differential
treatment to protect people in
poverty
The same international trade rules may not
have the same impact in different countries
depending on their level of economic
development (competitiveness on global
markets, supply side capacity, constraining
factors in the ability to access markets…)
and on their sectoral composition (e.g.
proportion of national production and
employment in agriculture). The gap
between the productivity of agriculture in
the North and of a limited number of
developing countries on the one hand and
the majority of developing countries on the
other hand was at 1 to 10 at the beginning
of the 20th century and now stands at 1 to
1000, if not more.36 Same rules for all, the
rich and the poor, the powerful and the
weak, create new injustices.
Therefore, special and differential
treatment (SDT) needs to be given to
developing countries in order to establish
global trade rules that aim to achieve not
trade growth but trade justice, development
and poverty reduction. However, most of
the provisions providing temporary
exceptions to general rules are in fact
meaningless for the large majority of
developing countries, which do not have the
right to provide export subsidies37 or the
means to do so, or administer TRQs38 (Tariff
Reduction Quotas), or provide trade
distorting domestic support to their
agricultural sectors as most developed
countries do.
Governments of developing countries
should be allowed to set their own course
for growth, diversification and development
and this principle should prevail over trade
liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation.
4. Promote agriculture and
rural development working
for poor people
The G20 emphasised that the tariff
reduction formula must contain for
developing countries: (i) progressivity –
deeper cuts to higher bound tariffs, (ii)
proportionality – developing countries
making lower reduction commitments than
developed countries and neutrality in
respect of tariff structures; and (iii) flexibility
– to take account of the sensitive nature of
some products without undermining the
overall objective of the reduction formula
and ensuring substantial improvement in
market access for all products.39 The G33
developing countries warned that
developing countries with already low
tariffs have little capacity to undertake
further significant cuts without disrupting
their rural economies.40 There should be
differentiated coefficients for rich and poor
36 Seminar « How to achieve food security: a major
challenge for policy coherence », Luxembourg EU
presidency, 21-23 March 2005, Luxembourg.
37 Only those countries that provided export subsidies
at the time of the Uruguay Round and inscribed
export subsidy commitments in their schedules of
commitments have the right to provide those
subsidies. The following developing countries have
the right to provide export subsidies: Brazil,
Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico, Panama, South
Africa, Turkey, Uruguay and Venezuela. WTO
document TN/AG/S/8.
38 During the Uruguay Round it was agreed that only
those countries that undertook tariffication were
given the option to establish commitments on
TRQs. Most developing countries did not tariffy but
rather established tariff ceilings. The following
developing countries inscribed TRQ commitments
in their schedules: Barbados, Brazil, Colombia,
Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El
Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico,
Morocco, Nicaragua, Panama, Philippines, South
Africa, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia, and
Venezuela. WTO document TN/AG/S/6.
39 G20 New Delhi Declaration, March 2005
40 G33 statement on market access, 13 December
2004.
countries in the final tariff reduction
formula to allow for this. The FAO noted
that “tariffs were often the primary, if not
the only, trade instrument open to these
countries for stabilising domestic markets
and safeguarding farmers’ interests”.41 The
WTO Agreement on agriculture should be
rebalanced by guaranteeing developing
countries the right to protect their borders
via quotas and/or quantitative restrictions as
long as Northern subsidies remain.
Given the lack of substantial progress by rich
countries in negotiations and the remaining
unbalanced nature of the AoA, developing
countries should have the right to
determine the nature and extent of their
tariff commitments in this round of
negotiations. If this includes choosing not to
cut their agricultural tariffs, and indeed
raising them, to secure development
objectives, they should be able to do so.
Developing countries’ farmers face high
costs in accessing markets due to lack of
infrastructure and other constraints. Indeed
most of the time, access to world markets
does not benefit farmers, but rather
industries and companies specialised in
international trade, whether national or
international. De minimis42 programmes are
one of the very limited options available to
developing countries to offset some of these
costs and other disadvantages faced by
farmers. Given that de minimis support is
the only form of support available to
farmers in most developing countries, any
attempt to reduce de minimis support in
developing countries should be avoided, as
this would negatively affect the
programmes benefiting subsistence and
resource poor farmers.43 The amounts of
support in developing countries are
insignificant when compared to those in
developed countries (over 95% of total
domestic support in agriculture goes to
farmers and the agri-industrial sector in
Make a Difference for Poverty Reduction
20
41 FAO, Agriculture, Trade and Food Security Issues
and Options in the WTO Negotiations from the
Perspective of Developing Countries - Vol. II
Country Case Studies (FAO, Rome 2000).
42 A de minimis threshold, expressed as a percentage,
is the amount of domestic support a country may
exempt from its calculation of total domestic
supports and therefore further reductions. For
developed countries, the de minimis threshold is
limited to 5 percent, while for developing
countries the de minimis threshold is 10 percent”
43 “Developed members with high domestic support
will reduce their support levels on an average basis
only, whereas developing members which hardly
give support would reduce it on a product-specific
basis. In other words, a discipline which has not
been accepted by developed countries since the
beginning is being imposed on developing
countries”, G33 statement on de minimis domestic
support, 14 March 2005
developed countries) and therefore should
not be subject to reductions.44
There are also some developing countries
for which there is no possibility of a net
positive outcome from negotiated changes
in trade policy until the very long term. LDCs
are particularly badly affected by some
aspects of current trade.45 These include not
just trade measures: tariffs, agricultural
subsidies, and the end of the MFA, but
environmental trade barriers and two
economic trends, the decline in extractive
industries and the fall in commodity prices.
Least Developed Countries need special
treatment, including duty-free, quota-free
access to richer countries’ markets. They
should be exempted from any reduction
commitments. Specific support should be
provided to promote their export capacities,
including the need to address the supply
constraints of LDCs. While promoting these
export capacities, special attention has to be
given to enhancing family-based farmers’
and national industries’ capacities for
organising themselves and benefiting from
this trade. Multinational companies
investing in developing countries derive
benefits from increased market access to the
North.
Special and Differential Treatment for
developing countries must constitute an
integral part of all elements with a view to
preserving the food security, rural
development and livelihood concerns of
millions of people who depend on the
agriculture sector
Protect rural development with
Special Products
Under the AoA, tariff reductions in
developing countries, in conjunction with
Northern agricultural subsidies, dumping
and concentration of global agribusiness,
have led to numerous instances of import
surges of food and other crops and a longterm
deterioration in agricultural trade
balances. These have particularly hurt small
farmers. Putting a pause to trade
liberalisation by exempting sensitive crops
from further tariff reductions can play a vital
role in national development programmes
directed at increasing small farmer
production and productivity, and
maintaining and creating employment
opportunities in the rural areas. Agricultural
products on whose production low-income
and resource poor farmers, including
women, depend for their basic food needs
and income should be exempted from
further tariff reductions.
In accordance with its own development
needs, each developing country should be
allowed to self-designate the SPs based on
an appropriate number of domesticallyproduced
agricultural products. The
selection of SPs should be made on the basis
of an appropriate number of products and
not tariff lines. The criteria for special
products should be their relevance for food
and livelihood security and rural
development. The design and
implementation of gender analysis and
gender sensitive policies should be
integrated when defining trade policies,
especially special products provisions, to
ensure that the needs of women as
producers and as those responsible for
household nutrition are protected.46 The
treatment of SPs must be more flexible
compared with the treatment of other
products, including sensitive products. Given
that many developing countries bound their
tariffs at low levels during the Uruguay
Round, especially in relation to the
conditonalities of IMF and World Bank
loans, special products should be exempt
from further tariff reductions, tariff
increases should even be allowed if
necessary and must not be excluded from
the coverage of the Special Safeguard
Measure.
Protect food security with
Special Safeguard Mechanisms
Developing countries should not be
expected to undertake fast, deep and across
the board agricultural trade liberalisation as
A CIDSE Caritas Internationalis Position Paper
21
44 G20 New Delhi Declaration, March 2005, G33
statement on de minimis domestic support, 14
March 2005.
45 UNCTAD Secretariat (2004) The Least Developed
Country Report, New York and Geneva, United
Nations.
46 Hernández, María Pía, Incorporating Gender
Considerations for the Designation of Special
Products in WTO Agriculture negotiations, IGTN,
Geneva, March 2005.
a result of the current negotiations, given
the negative impact of such liberalisation on
their food security situation to date. Special
safeguard mechanisms should provide
flexibility to developing countries to protect
small farmers, including removing food
security crops from tariff reduction
commitments or raising tariffs. If a crop is of
crucial importance to food security in a poor
country, governments should have the
flexibility to set tariffs at whatever level
required to protect the livelihoods of the
poor against fluctuations in prices, even if
that involves raising them.47 This is a shortterm
mechanism for dealing with price
volatility, not a long-term solution to the
structural imbalances of world trade.
Moreover, the value of the safeguard
mechanism will depend on the detail of the
mechanism still to be negotiated. The WTO’s
existing Special Safeguard Mechanism –
used primarily by rich countries - was
conceived as a transitional instrument and
should be eliminated. Constraints regarding
the trigger mechanisms for using the current
SSG as well as restrictions related to the
remedy measures that can be applied have
led developing countries to propose the
establishment of a new special safeguard
mechanism available to all developing
countries to help them address import
surges and price volatility.48 Overall,
developing countries made use of the SSM
in just 5 per cent of the cases for which they
could have used it, in large part because the
criteria needed to trigger its use are too
strict and cumbersome.49
The safeguard mechanism should be easy to
use and applicable for all products.
Safeguards could be invoked both on the
basis of a drop in prices or a significant
increase in the volume of imports. The new
SSM should cover all agricultural products, in
particular SPs. Import surges and steep drops
in prices for any crop can have deleterious
effects on their rural economy, employment
and farmers’ income levels, and there is no
reason to exclude a priori some agricultural
products from protection against import
surges.
As the SSM intends to smooth out
temporary fluctuations in imports or a drop
in price that can disrupt local production, it
should allow developing countries to take
measures beyond tariffs, including non-tariff
measures such as quantitative restrictions.
Developing countries attempted to address
the concerns regarding the effects of the
SSM on South-South trade50 by proposing
that where imports from other developing
countries are not significant (i.e. no more
than 3 per cent of total imports of the
product concerned and no more than 9 per
cent of imports of the product concerned
from countries below the 3 per cent
threshold taken together) such imports shall
be exempted from the application of the
SSM.
Open policy space for
sustainable agriculture
development
Headline figures from projections conducted
by econometric studies have beguiled policy
makers into assuming that developing
countries will automatically benefit from
global agricultural liberalisation. But these
projections ignore issues with important
implications for most of the poor developing
countries: in particular, the supply-side
rigidities or lack of capacity to take
advantage of market opportunities and
losses caused by erosion of trade
preferences. The EU, the US and other
powerful trading blocs must also take stock
of the failure of the dominant paradigm of
liberal trade policies as part of exportoriented
economic growth, promoted as the
model for developing countries by the WTO
and the international financial institutions.
This model does not, and has never, provided
an automatic path to poverty eradication,
Make a Difference for Poverty Reduction
22
47 Matthews, Alan (2003) Special and Differential
Treatment Proposals in the WTO Agricultural
Negotiations, International Conference on
Agricultural Policy Reform and the WTO: where are
we heading?, Capari, Italy, June 23-26, 2003.
48 WTO document JOB(02)/177/Rev.1. Proposal
presented by Cuba, Dominican Republic, Grenada,
Honduras, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka
and Venezuela.
49 FAO, Consultation on the Special Safeguard
Mechanism, Rome, December 2004.
50 WTO document JOB(02)/177/Rev.1. Proposal
presented by Cuba, Dominican Republic, Grenada,
Honduras, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka
and Venezuela.
the key objective of any development policy.
In practice, trade liberalisation often tends to
increase poverty and food insecurity, and
widen the gap between rich and poor men
and - particularly - women.51 Poor countries
need the right and the capacity to regulate
trade and investment in the interests of
national development, with the necessary
protection when building up industries and
gradual openness when the right conditions
are put in place.52
Some economic models predict that poor
developing countries will face net losses, in
the politically likely scenario of small or
medium levels of global agricultural
liberalisation.53 The elimination of Northern
agricultural subsidies impacting on
international trade is only one element in
the trade policy reform needed to make
agriculture work for poverty reduction. The
dogged pursuit of the rapid and unhindered
opening of Southern agricultural markets
will negate any benefit derived from reform
of Northern agricultural and trade policies.
Indeed, most poor rural producers are
simply unable to compete against
international agribusiness and richer
producers with much greater capacity and a
highly capitalised agriculture, even without
subsidies.54 Poor and small-scale farmers
depend on the functioning of local markets
and effective national policies that promote
rural development. These policies will fail, or
their impact will be severely limited, if
agricultural markets are opened too rapidly
without allowing developing countries to
maintain the conditions in which pro-poor
agricultural policies can be implemented.
Poverty of peasants in developing countries
is the result of the existence of an
agricultural price formation system which
A CIDSE Caritas Internationalis Position Paper
23
51 See: The Impact of Trade Liberalisation on Food
Security in the South. A Literature Review by John
Madeley and Solagral, CIDSE, May 2001.
52 See: Joseph Stiglitz, Globalisation and its
Discontents (2002), Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away
the Ladder (2002), Ha-Joon Chang, Duncan Green,
The Northern Agenda on Investment: Do as we say,
not as we did, South Centre/CAFOD, June 2003
53 Achterbosch, T.J. et al. “Trade liberalisation under
the Doha Development Agenda; Options and
consequences for Africa”, (Agricultural Economics
Research Institute (LEI), United Nations Economic
Commission for Africa, The Hague, 2004).
Stephens, Christopher, “Food Trade and Food
Policy in sub Saharan Africa: Old Myths and New
Challenges” Development Policy Review, 2003 21
(5). Jean-Christophe Bureau, Sébastien Jean and
Alan Matthews, “The consequences of agricultural
trade liberalization for developing countries:
distinguishing between genuine benefits and false
hopes”, Institute for international integration
studies, 2005, Discussion Paper No.73
54 This process is well described in Stephens,
Christopher ‘‘Food Trade and Food Policy in sub
Saharan Africa: Old Myths and New Challenges’,
Development Policy Review, 2003 21 (5).
leads to a decrease in these prices and, as a
consequence, a collapse in the revenue and
the purchasing power of this population.
The global prices of the main products of
agricultural trade – corn, wheat, soy, cotton
and rice – have fallen by over 40% since
1996. A similar phenomenon can be
observed regarding other important export
products, especially within certain Least
Developed Countries. Thus, within the last
20 years, prices of coffee, cocoa, sugar and
palm oil have decreased by over 60%.
Between 1985 and 2002, the average world
market price of rice fluctuated between
310$­­ and 185$­­.55 This situation is made even
more alarming by the fact that the
governments of these countries are not able
to grant subsidies to their farmers, especially
when tariff cuts deprive them of one of their
financial resources.
Over the last 20 years, many of the
instruments for public intervention in
agricultural commodities such as state
marketing boards have disappeared as
structural adjustment programmes cut
government spending and reduced the
possibilities of states to regulate. Instead of
seeking to redress the imbalance, WTO rules
have locked all countries into the existing
unfair system, which is characterised by
many developing countries having few trade
barriers, leaving them little space to reintroduce
trade policies to support their
agriculture sector.56
Fair prices and price stability are crucial
issues as they directly affect farm incomes
and agricultural workers’ wages and, hence,
food security and poverty reduction. It is
likely that the elimination of subsidies under
the current WTO Agreement on Agriculture
will not result in a price increase and not
even their stabilisation. Fair prices allow
producers to renew their very modest
working capital, to modernise this capital
and increase productivity, to provide for the
basic needs of their families and those of
agricultural workers and to be less
dependent on development aid. Price
stabilisation policies, and in some cases
supply management, may be useful tools for
developing country states to use to achieve
these goals. The WTO and other
international institutions should not impose
constraints on them doing so. According to
the FAO, bound tariffs would need to be set
at around 40-60 per cent in order to cope
with world market fluctuations in their
prices, with an additional 10-15 per cent to
ensure protection for basic foods.57 Policy
space will allow each government or
regional grouping to put in place price
support mechanisms, accompanied where
necessary by supply management, in order
to prevent and address the collapse of
agricultural prices.
In order to pursue policies that assure all
residents a basic standard of living,
developing countries need policy space,
rather than rigid and constricting trade rules
which constrain and shape the formulation
of domestic policy. The Consensus of
UNCTAD XI, agreed in June 2004 stated: “It
is for each Government to evaluate the
trade-off between the benefits of accepting
international rules and commitments and
the constraints posed by the loss of policy
space. It is particularly important for
developing countries, bearing in mind
development goals and objectives, that all
countries take into account the need for
appropriate balance between national
policy space and international disciplines
and commitments”.58 Trade rules are not
flexible enough in many areas to allow poor
countries to develop and implement trade
policy consistent with both short and long
term development objectives.59
Make a Difference for Poverty Reduction
24
55 OXFAM, Kicking down the door, April 2005, p.45.
56 South Bulletin 100, 30 March 2005.
57 Sharma, R, “Quantifying appropriate levels of the
WTO Bound tariffs on basic food products in the
context of the development Box proposals”, FAO,
Rome, 2004.
58 UNCTAD XI, Sao Paulo Consensus, para. 8, page 3
59 In Trade and Solidarity: A statement of the Catholic
bishop’s conference of England and Wales and the
Catholic Bishop’s Conference of Scotland 2003
(http://www.cafod.org.uk/policy/trade_solidarity
2003.shtml) it was stated that: . “Despite all the
efforts made to transform the situation, the
economic and trade relationships between the
wealthy and the poor countries of the world
remain deeply unjust. If trade rules are to take
account of the needs of the poorest and most
vulnerable sectors of society, the process of
liberalisation must not override such primary
development goals as poverty reduction, health
and education”
The challenge is to develop models for
agriculture that strengthen public goods
(including food security), resilient
ecosystems, vibrant economies and genetic
diversity. To some extent, this is already
happening. Researchers at the University of
Essex found that 9 million farmers around
the developing world now use sustainable
agricultural practices and technologies, up
from 0.5 million in 1990. The new
approaches, which account for about 3 per
cent of all agricultural land, have
systematically improved yields:
- when 45,000 families in Guatemala,
Nicaragua and Honduras introduced the
nitrogen-fixing velvet bean into their
maize fields, the natural fertiliser
produced by ploughing the bean back
into the soil led to a rise in yields from
400-600kg/ha to 2,000-2,500 kg/ha.
- Kenyan farmers who used double-dug
beds with composting, green and
animal manures found that after four to
six seasons, their land had better water
holding capacity and was able to sustain
vegetable growth into the dry season.
The number of households free from
hunger rose from 43 per cent to 75 per
cent, the number of households buying
vegetables during the year fell from 85
per cent to 11 per cent and the number
of maize self-sufficient households more
than doubled from 22 per cent to 48 per
cent.
The current WTO Agreement on Agriculture
embodies one of several different models of
agriculture. It favours large-scale, industrial
farming, and – for the South in particular –
significantly narrows the choices that each
country can make about its own economic
development. Local communities and the
domestic private sector should be allowed to
protect and promote some of these
practices, while recognising the role of
accountable national governments and
international institutions in moving towards
better models.
A CIDSE Caritas Internationalis Position Paper
25
26
CIDSE and Caritas Internationalis call on the
Sixth WTO Ministerial Conference to reach a
pro-poor perspective in integrating in its
conclusions the following proposals:
Give a clear priority to progress
on agriculture
Given the development objectives of the
Doha Round, a clear political priority must
be given to reaching conclusions on prodevelopment
rules in international
agricultural trade.
Progress on agriculture must not be linked
to any condition of reaching sufficient
outcomes in the others pillars of the
negotiations. The Ministerial should narrow
its work to reaching outcomes on the core
issues already under negotiation in
agriculture and should avoid any new “issue
of interest but not agreed”.
Stop trade distortion that
generates poverty
Stop trade liberalisation denying the
liberties of the poor - The WTO should fully
embrace the concept underwritten in the
Monterrey Consensus of trade as an engine
for development. The WTO should endorse
the UN Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs) as its overarching objective. The
negotiating process must be more
transparent and more inclusive.
Stop making the poor pay the cost of trade
liberalisation – Loss of revenue by
developing countries due to tariff cuts and
preferences erosion in agriculture should be
compensated by trade concessions or
development support from the developed
countries.
Stop dumping on developing countries’
markets - Northern countries should
substantially reform their agricultural
subsidy regimes to ensure an end to the
dumping of products on global markets.
Through a balancing measure, the
importing developing countries should have
the flexibility to impose additional duties on
subsidised imports by calculating a subsidyequivalent
tariff.
Stop trade-distorting supports – Member
States have to commit on a short deadline to
eliminate, through a tiered formula, all
Amber Box supports (trade-distorting
subsidies). A clear frontloaded schedule
should be set up for eliminating export
subsidies and support. Product-specific caps
and reduction commitments should be
introduced by establishing criteria to
disaggregate Blue Box payments at a
product-specific level. A thorough review of
the Green Box (de-coupled and “minimally
trade-distorting” subsidies) is needed to
ensure that any remaining domestic support
has minimal trade-distorting effects and
contributes to public goods such as
environmental protection and securing the
livelihoods of small farmers. The Green Box
should accommodate development
programmes in developing countries.
Disciplines are needed on the Blue Box and
Green Box, in order to thwart “box
shifting”. Developed countries should
commit to develop standard harmonisation
and to significantly reduce all non-tariff
trade barriers.
Promote agriculture and rural
development working for poor
people
Mainstream differential treatment to
protect people in poverty – Special and
Differential Treatment for developing
countries must constitute an integral part of
all elements of the Agreement on
Agriculture. The tariff reduction formula for
developing countries must contain
progressivity, proportionality and flexibility.
The coefficients for rich and poor countries
should be differentiated in the final tariff
reduction formula. The WTO Agreement on
agriculture should be rebalanced by
5. Summary of policy
recommendations
guaranteeing developing countries the right
to protect their borders via quotas and/or
quantitative restrictions as long as Northern
subsidies remain. Given the remaining
unbalanced nature of the AoA, developing
countries should have the right to
determine the nature and extent of their
tariff commitments in this round of
negotiations (including not cutting their
agricultural tariffs, or raising them to secure
development objectives). Any attempt to
reduce de minimis support in developing
countries should be avoided, as this would
negatively affect the programmes
benefiting subsistence and resource poor
farmers. Least Developed Countries need
special treatment, including duty-free,
quota-free access to richer countries’
markets and exemption from any reduction
commitments.
Protect rural development with Special
Products - In accordance with its own needs
for food and livelihood security and rural
development, each developing country
should be allowed to self-designate Special
Products based on an appropriate number
of domestically-produced agricultural
products. Special products provision should
especially protect women as producers and
as those responsible for household nutrition.
Special products should be exempt from
further tariff reductions and must not be
excluded from the coverage of the Special
Safeguard Measure.
Protect food security with Special Safeguard
Mechanisms - In case of a drop in prices or a
significant increase in the volume of
imports, a Special Safeguard Mechanism
should provide flexibility to
developing countries to protect small
farmers, including removing any
food security crops from tariff
reduction commitments, raising
tariffs or non tariff measures such as
quantitative restrictions.
Open policy space for sustainable
agricultural development - Flexibility
should be given to the developing
countries to develop national policies
(price stabilisation, supply
management…) that address the
challenges of poor countries’
agriculture. Local communities and
the domestic private sector should be
allowed to protect and promote some of the
sustainable agriculture practices, while
recognising the role of accountable national
governments and international institutions
in moving towards better models.
A CIDSE Caritas Internationalis Position Paper
27
CIDSE Secretariat General
Contact: Guillaume Légaut
16 Rue Stévin, B-1000 Brussels, Belgium
Tel: +32 2 230 7722
Fax: +32 2 230 7082
E-mail: postmaster@cidse.org
Web: www.cidse.org
Broederlijk Delen
Contact: Mr. Bart Bode
165 Huidevettersstraat,
B - 1000 Brussels, Belgium
Tel: +32 2 502 5700
Fax: +32 2 502 8101
E-mail: info@broederlijkdelen.be
Web: www.broederlijkdelen.be
Catholic Agency for Overseas Development
(CAFOD)
Contact: Mr. Matthew Griffith
2 Romero Close,
Stockwell Road,
London SW9 9TY, England
Tel: +44 20 7733 7900
Fax: +44 20 7274 9630
E-mail: receptio@cafod.org.uk
Web: www.cafod.org.uk
Comité Catholique contre la Faim et pour le
Développement (CCFD)
Contact: Ms. Catherine Gaudard
4 rue Jean Lantier,
F - 75001 Paris, France
Tel: +33 1 4482 8000,
Fax: +33 1 4482 8143
E-mail: ccfd@ccfd.asso.fr
Web: www.ccfd.asso.fr
Cordaid
Contact: Mr. Bob van Dillen
Lutherse Burgwal 10,
Postbus 16440
NL - 2500 BK Den Haag,
The Netherlands
Tel: +31 70 313 6300
Fax: +31 70 313 6301
E-mail: cordaid@cordaid.nl
Web: www.cordaid.nl
Development and Peace
5633 Est, rue Sherbrooke,
Montreal - Quebec H1N 1A3,
Canada
Tel: +1 514 257 8711,
Fax: +1 514 257 8497
E-mail: info@devp.org
Web: www.devp.org
Entraide et Fraternité
32 rue du Gouvernement Provisoire,
B-1000 Brussels, Belgium
Tel: +32 2 227 6680
Fax: +32 2 217 3259
E-mail: entraide@entraide.be
Web: www.entraide.be
Fastenopfer/ Action de Carême/ Swiss
Lenten Fund
Contact: Ms. Anette Homlicher
44 Habsburgerstrasse,
Postfach 2856,
CH-6002 Luzern, Switzerland
Tel: +41 41 227 5959
Fax: +41 41 227 5910
E-mail: mail@fastenopfer.ch
Web: www.fastenopfer.ch
Koordinierungsstelle
Contact: Ms. Judith Zimmermann-Hößl
3 Türkenstrasse,
A - 1090 Vienna, Austria
Tel: +43 1 317 0321,
Fax: +43 1 317 0321 85
E-mail: info@koo.at
Web: www.koo.at
Manos Unidas
Contact: Ms. Maria Teresa Valdivieso
Barquillo 38 - 3°,
28004 Madrid, Spain
Tel: +34 91 308 2020,
Fax: +34 91 308 4208
E-mail: info@manosunidas.org
Web: www.manosunidas.org
28
CIDSE Members
Misereor
Contact: Ms. Alicia Kolmans
Postfach 1450,
9 Mozartstrasse,
D - 52064 Aachen, Germany
Tel: +49 241 4420,
Fax: +49 241 4421 88
E-mail: postmaster@misereor.de
Web: www.misereor.org
Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund
(SCIAF)
Contact: Mr. Patrick Bell
19 Park Circus,
Glasgow G3 6BE,
Scotland
Tel: +44 141 354 5555,
Fax: +44 141 354 5533
E-mail: sciaf@sciaf.org.uk
Web: www.sciaf.org.uk
Trócaire
Contact: Mr. Michael O’Brien
Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland
Tel: +353 1 629 3333
Fax: +353 1 629 0658/ 629 0661
E-mail: info@trocaire.ie
Web: www.trocaire.org
Volontari nel mondo - FOCSIV
Contact: Dr. Alberta Guerra
18 Via S. Francesco di Sales,
I - 00165 Rome, Italy
Tel:+39 06 687 7796
Fax: +39 06 687 2373
E-mail: focsiv@focsiv.it
Web: www.focsiv.it
ASSOCIATE MEMBERS
Bridderlech Deelen
27, Rue Michel Welter, L - 2730 Luxembourg
Tel: +352 26 842650
Fax: +352 26 842659
E-mail: bridderlech.deelen@cathol.lu
Center of Concern
Contact: Mrs. Maria Riley
1225 Otis St NE,
Washington, DC 20017, USA
Tel: +1 202 635 2757,
Fax: +1 202 832 9494
E-mail: coc@coc.org
Web www.coc.org
STRATEGIC PARTNER
Catholic Relief Service
Contact: Ms. Kathleen Selvaggio
209 West Fayette Street
Baltimore, MD 21201, USA
Tel: +1 410 951 7449
Fax: +1 410 685 1635
E-mail: kselvagg@catholicrelief.org
Web: www.catholicrelief.org
MIJARC
Contact: Mr. George Dixon
Tel: +32 2 7349211
Fax: +32 2 7349225
Rue Joseph Coosemans 53
1030 Brussels
Belgium
E-mail: world@mijarc.org
Web: www.mijarc.org
A CIDSE Caritas Internationalis Position Paper
29
30
Caritas internationalis – Secretariat General
Contact: Jacques Bertrand, Jean-Claude
Michellod and Yuri Munsayac
Palazzo San Calisto - 00120 Vatican City
Tel: (+39) 06 698 797 99
E-mail: caritas.internationalis@caritas.va
http://www.caritas.org
AFRICA
ANGOLA - Caritas de Angola
BENIN - Caritas Benin
BOTSWANA - Tirisanyo Catholic Commission
- Caritas Botswana
BURKINA FASO - OCADES - Caritas Burkina
Faso
BURUNDI - CED - Caritas Burundi
CAMEROON - BASC - Bureau des Activités
Socio-Caritatives - Caritas Cameroun
CAPE VERDE - Caritas Caboverdeana
CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC - Caritas
Centrafrique
CHAD - UNAD - Union Nationale des
Associations Diocésaines de Secours et de
Développement - Caritas Tchad
COMOROS - Caritas Comores
CONGO REPUBLIC - Caritas République du
Congo
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO -
Commission Episcopale Caritas /
Développement - Caritas République
Démocratique du Congo
EQUATORIAL GUINEA - Caritas Guinea
Ecuatorial
ERITREA - Eritrean Catholic Secretariat
ETHIOPIA - Ethiopian Catholic Secretariat
GABON - Caritas Gabon
GAMBIA - Catholic Development Office
GHANA - SED - Department of Socio-
Economic Development - Caritas Ghana
GUINEA - OCPH - Organisation Catholique
pour la Promotion Humaine - Caritas
Rép. de Guinée
GUINEA-BISSAU - Caritas Guinée-Bissau
IVORY COAST - Caritas Côte d’Ivoire
KENYA - Caritas Kenya
LESOTHO - Department of Development -
Caritas Lesotho
LIBERIA - Caritas Liberia
MADAGASCAR - Caritas Madagascar
MALAWI - CADECOM - Catholic
Development Commission in Malawi -
Caritas Malawi
MALI - Commission Nationale de Pastorale
Sociale - Caritas Mali
MAURITIUS - Caritas Ile Maurice
MOZAMBIQUE - Caritas Moçambicana
NAMIBIA - NACADEC - Namibian Catholic
Development Commission
NIGER - Caritas Niger
NIGERIA - Caritas Nigeria
RWANDA - Caritas Rwanda
SAO TOME & PRINCIPE - Caritas Sao Tome &
Principe
SENEGAL - Caritas Senegal
SEYCHELLES - Caritas Seychelles
SIERRA LEONE - NCDCO - National Catholic
Development and Caritas Office
SOUTH AFRICA - Caritas South Africa
SUDAN - SUDANAID - Caritas Sudan
SWAZILAND - Caritas Swaziland
TANZANIA - Caritas Tanzania
TOGO - OCDI - Organisation de la Charité
pour un Développement Intégral -
Caritas Togo
UGANDA - Uganda Catholic Secretariat -
Caritas Uganda
ZAMBIA - Catholic Commission for
Development (CCD)
ZIMBABWE - Catholic Development
Commission - Caritas Zimbabwe
AMERICA LATINA & CARIBBEAN
ANTILLES - Antilles Episcopal Conference -
Caritas Antilles
ARGENTINA - Caritas Argentina
Caritas Internationalis Members
BOLIVIA - Pastoral Social - Caritas Boliviana
BRAZIL - Caritas Brasileira
CHILE - Caritas Chile
COLOMBIA - SNPS - Secretariado Nacional
de Pastoral Social - Caritas Colombia
COSTA RICA - Pastoral Social Caritas Costa
Rica
CUBA - Caritas Cuba
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC - Caritas Dominicana
ECUADOR - SENAPS - Secretariado Nacional
de Pastoral Social - Caritas Ecuador
EL SALVADOR - Caritas El Salvador
GUATEMALA - Caritas de Guatemala
HAITÍ - Caritas Haiti
HONDURAS - Caritas de Honduras
MÉXICO - CEPS - Caritas Mexicana
NICARAGUA - Caritas Nicaragua
PANAMA - Pastoral Social - Caritas Panamá
PARAGUAY - Pastoral Social Nacional -
Caritas Paraguay
PERU - Caritas del Peru
PUERTO RICO - Servicios Sociales Catolicos -
Caritas Puerto Rico
URUGUAY - Caritas Uruguaya
VENEZUELA - Caritas de Venezuela
ASIA
BANGLADESH - Caritas Bangladesh
CAMBODIA - Caritas Cambodia
EAST TIMOR - Caritas East Timor
HONG KONG - Caritas Hong Kong
INDIA - Caritas India
INDONESIA - Caritas Indonesia
JAPAN - Caritas Japan
KAZAKHSTAN - Caritas Kazakhstan
KOREA - Caritas Coreana
MACAU - Caritas Macau
MALAYSIA - NOHD - National Office for
Human Development
MONGOLIA - Caritas Mongolia
MYANMAR - Karuna Myanmar Social
Services - Caritas Myanmar
NEPAL - Caritas Nepal
PAKISTAN - Caritas Pakistan
PHILIPPINES - NASSA - National Secretariat
of Social Action - Caritas Philippines
SINGAPORE - Catholic Welfare Services -
Caritas Singapore
SRI LANKA - SEDEC - Social Economic
Development Centre - Caritas Sri Lanka
TAIWAN-R.O.C. - Commission for Social
Development - Caritas Taiwan
TAJIKISTAN - Caritas Tajikistan
THAILAND - CCHD - Catholic Commission
for Human Development - Caritas
Thailand
UZBEKISTAN - Caritas Uzbekistan
EUROPE
ALBANIA - Caritas Shqiptar - Albania
ANDORRA - Caritas Andorrana
ARMENIA - Caritas Armenia
AUSTRIA - Oesterreichische Caritaszentrale
AZERBAIJAN - Caritas Azerbaijan
BELARUS - Caritas Belarus
BELGIUM - Caritas Secours International
Belgique
BELGIUM - Caritas Catholica Belgica
BELGIUM - Caritas en Communauté
Française et Germanophone
BELGIUM - Caritas Vlaanderen - Belgium
BOSNIA – HERZEGOVINA - Caritas Bosnia-
Herzegovina
BULGARIA - Caritas Bulgaria
CROATIA - Caritas Croatia
CZECH REPUBLIC - Ceska Katolicka Charita -
Caritas Ceska
DENMARK - Caritas Danmark
ENGLAND – WALES - CAFOD - Catholic Fund
for Overseas Development - Caritas
England and Wales
ENGLAND – WALES - Caritas - Social Action
ESTONIA - Eesti Caritas - Caritas Estonia
FINLAND - Caritas Finland
FRANCE - Secours Catholique - Caritas
France
GEORGIA - Caritas Georgia
GERMANY - Deutscher Caritasverband
GREECE - Caritas Hellas
HUNGARY - Caritas Hungarica
ICELAND - Caritas Island
IRELAND - TROCAIRE - Caritas Ireland
ITALY - Caritas Italiana
LATVIA - Caritas Latvia
LITHUANIA - Caritas Lithuania
LUXEMBOURG - Caritas Luxembourg
A CIDSE Caritas Internationalis Position Paper
31
MACEDONIA - Caritas Macedonia
MALTA - Caritas Malta
MOLDOVA - Caritas Moldova
MONACO - Caritas Monaco
NETHERLANDS - CORDAID
NORWAY - Caritas Norge
POLAND - Caritas Polska
PORTUGAL - Caritas Portuguesa
ROMANIA - Confederatia Caritas Romania
RUSSIA - Federal Caritas of Russia
RUSSIA - Caritas of the Asian Part of Russia
RUSSIA - Caritas of the European Part of
Russia
SCOTLAND - SCIAF - Scottish Catholic
International Aid Fund - Caritas Scotland
SERBIA – MONTENEGRO - Caritas Serbia -
Montenegro
SLOVAKIA - Slovenská Katolícka Charita /
Caritas Slovakia
SLOVENIA - Slovenska Karitas
SPAIN - Caritas Española
SWEDEN - Caritas Sverige
SWITZERLAND - Caritas Schweiz
TURKEY - Caritas Turquie
UKRAINE - Caritas Spes - Caritas of Roman
Catholic Church in Ukraine
UKRAINE - Caritas Ukraine - Caritas of
Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine
MIDDLE EAST / NORTH AFRICA
ALGERIA - Services Caritas des Diocèses
d’Algérie - Caritas Algérie
CYPRUS - Koinonia Caritas
DJIBOUTI - Caritas Djibouti
EGYPT - Caritas Egypte
IRAN - Caritas Iran
IRAQ - Caritas Iraq
JORDAN - Caritas Jordan
LEBANON - Caritas Liban
LIBYA - Caritas Libie
MAURITANIA - Caritas Mauritanie
MOROCCO - Caritas Maroc
SOMALIA - Caritas Somalia
SYRIA - Caritas Syrie - Commission
Commune de Bienfaisance - C.C.B. Syrie
TUNISIA - Services Caritas de la Prélature -
Caritas Tunisie
LEBANON - Caritas Internationalis
NORTH AMERICA
Canada - Développement et Paix /
Development and Peace - Caritas Canada
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - Catholic
Charities USA - Caritas USA
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - Catholic
Relief Services - Caritas USA
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - Catholic
Campaign for Human Development
(USCC-CCHD)
OCEANIA
AUSTRALIA - Caritas Australia
NEW ZEALAND - Caritas Aotearoa - New
Zealand
PACIFIC ISLANDS - CEPAC - Comm. for
Justice and Development - Caritas Pacific
Islands
PAPUA NEW GUINEA - Caritas Papua New
Guinea
SOLOMON ISLANDS - Caritas Solomon
Islands
TONGA - Caritas Tonga (CCJD)
Make a Difference for Poverty Reduction
32

Date de création : 10/11/2005 : 16:26
Dernière modification : 12/11/2005 : 19:07
Catégorie : Pauvreté

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