Speech
19 June 2008
Encouraging trade with developing countries - Speech by Gareth Thomas
On Thursday 19 June, Minister for Trade and Development Gareth Thomas spoke
to industry leaders and retailers at an Agrofair event about the crucial role
the private sector can play in encouraging trade with developing countries and
scaling up the development impact of UK procurement in Africa. Here is the full
text of the speech.
Trade matters hugely for us in the UK and indeed for every country around the world. Without buying and selling – without trade between one person and another or one country and another – we would all be poorer.
In Britain, we would literally starve if we did not import large volumes of food. Our wealth is built on the breadth and choice of the markets that we can sell to or buy from.
In the UK, as you will know, we rely on food imports and have done for centuries. Today, over 90% of the fruit and almost 40% of the vegetables we eat are imported. UK customers spend over
£1 million a day on fruit and vegetables from Africa and a growing amount of this is on high value fruit and vegetables – products like fresh pineapple chunks and prepared vegetables that mean work for farmers and jobs for food processors.
In Africa the fresh fruit and vegetable trade means that a million African farmers and their families benefit.
Companies like Agrofair – together with UK retailers - have led the way in developing African horticulture to supply shoppers with the fruit and vegetables they want year round.
This is very encouraging, but we can do more.
UK supermarkets turnover around £100 billion each year.
Of this – they spend less than 3% - £2.7 billion in 2006 – on products from developing countries.
We want to see this increase dramatically. In product categories like freshly prepared fruit and vegetables – products like the ones that Agrofair sells - products that provide livelihoods for farmers and jobs for processors – we want to see UK retailers double the value of their trade with developing countries by 2015.
Our research shows that developing countries have
tremendous appetite to trade. We have shown that small farmers and the poor can
meet the high standards required of UK markets.
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More jobs for poor people
DFID and Chatham House have set up a “Procurement for
Development Forum” to work out how to scale up the development impact of
UK procurement in Africa and are actively working with UK supermarkets and food
manufacturers to make this happen.
The £3 billion that UK
retailers spend in developing countries mean thousands of jobs for poor people
who have few alternatives. We also need to know whether these jobs are decent
jobs.
UK retailers have a
responsibility to make sure their suppliers pay a living wage. Many take this
very seriously – take Primark’s announcement on Tuesday that they have
de-listed three factories in India that misled them about child labour in their
supply chain.
Primark is a member of Ethical
Trading Initiative and their announcement is an example of how ETI is
challenging retailers to become much more aware of how their suppliers operate.
We want more retailers to join the Ethical Trading Initiative and to work with
suppliers to improve their labour standards.
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Ranking retailers
We want retailers to give their
customers more information about where the things they buy come from and how
they are made.
We want shoppers to know how
“ethical” the retailers they buy goods from are. For example – which ones
guarantee a “living wage” in these times of high food prices. Which retailers
are ready to change their business to increase their development impact and cut
out bad practice in their supply chains.
We want to see retailers
challenged on their fair and ethical performance.
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Labelling makes a difference
One of the great development
success stories in both the UK and Africa in the last eight years and more has been Fairtrade, which we have funded from the beginning. Fairtrade has put
development on the shopping map. Buying food and clothes with the Fairtrade
label makes a difference.
Bob Malichi is a bee keeper in
the North of Zambia. Since Zambian honey has been certified for exports to
European markets, livelihoods in his community have improved significantly.
Last year they sold their
uncertified honey for £700 a ton, this year they can earn over a £1,000 for
certified organic honey and over £1,200 for Fairtrade labelled honey. This means
parents now pay for their children to go to school and they can buy medicine
when they need it. Bob is one of the thousands of farmers who benefit from
shoppers in the UK who buy products with the Fairtrade Label.
There are millions of other
farmers in developing countries who are looking for good prices and steady
demand. That is why we are also funding Fairtrade to expand their work to
achieve a four-fold expansion by 2012 to £2 billion a year.
Fairtrade Labelled, Organic and
other certified products from developing countries can make real difference to
farmers’ incomes but we want to see even faster progress. We want more trade
with developing countries and we want more of it to be fair and ethical. We
need to try harder. We would like to see a step change in fair and ethical trade
labelling so it becomes the norm rather than the exception.
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Far-reaching goals on trade
The UK’s goals on trade and
development are far-reaching and ambitious. We are committed to reducing global,
regional and internal trade barriers so developing countries have much better
access to developed countries markets.
We need to push for trade deals
that are fair and promote development. Economic Partnership Agreements have
recently been agreed with some of the poorest countries. These guarantee 100%
duty free and quota free access to EU markets. This is a step in the right
direction but we need to do even more to expand poor countries opportunities to
trade.
The UK will continue to press WTO members to secure a
pro-development deal, reducing global trade barriers at the Doha trade talks.
And we will continue to work at the local level, increasing
our Aid for Trade to developing countries to address internal barriers to trade
– such as poor infrastructure, excessive red tape and inadequate skills and
knowledge.
We will also continue to challenge the spurious food miles
debate where some rightly worried about the contribution air freight makes to
CO2 emissions argue we should air freight fewer goods from developing countries
even though developing countries will be hit by climate change and are the least
responsible for it.
All these global actions make a difference but individuals'
and retailers' actions are critical too. Consumers make choices about what they
buy and why. Retailers make choices about where they buy from and how they share
this information with customers. We need to encourage “shopping for
development”, give individuals the right information to make pro-development
choices and harness consumer power to buy more from developing countries so they
do more to support development every day.
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