What is the Trade Out of Poverty Campaign About?

The campaign is an independent, all-party movement dedicated to one thing: tackling poverty by helping the world’s poorest countries trade their way to a better life for their people. The campaign aims to achieve for trade policy towards developing countries what popular campaigns did to persuade governments to commit to Aid targets and drop Debt burdens.

Why?

Because trade has always offered countries a path to prosperity. The developing world’s success stories – Korea, China, Brazil – used trade to become what they are today.

So what’s stopping other countries doing the same?

A lot of factors. The poorest countries face an even harder struggle to follow in the footsteps of countries like China, India and Brazil since they have to compete against those low wage economies who have already achieved a critical mass of industrialisation. But in particular they are suffering because we in the developed world won’t let them trade their way up.

• We block their exports to us or demand too much in return
• We subsidise our own exports and dump surpluses destroying their industries and agriculture
• We impose complex rules of origin that make a mockery even of our commitments to give a few countries’ exports preferential treatment.

There are other barriers too. Poor countries typically have damaged or decaying infrastructures that make movement of goods for export difficult and they may lack administrative structures to meet quality standards in end markets. And– in a supreme irony – they often impose high tariffs on each other to raise money because of their low domestic tax bases.

Trade Out of Poverty aims to tackle all those issues.