Towards Trade Justice

Several hundred people packed St Aldates, Oxford, Towards Trade Justice, a public meeting arranged by the diocesan World Development Group to mark the Global Week of Action on Trade.

Four speakers offered different perspectives and there was a lively question and answer session. The meeting was introduced by Jeff Alderson, and chaired by Wendy Tyndale.

The first speaker, John Hilary, campaigns and policy director of War on Want, outlined injustices in the current trading system and explained the aims of the Trade Justice Movement. He focused in part on the Trade Justice Movement’s key issue for 2005 – the way that developing countries have been forced to liberalise their markets.

Such liberalisation allows cheap, often heavily subsidised goods from other countries to flood in, often consigning local producers to poverty. The Bishop of Oxford reminded the audience of the challenge inherent in Luke’s version of the beatitudes: ‘Blessed are the poor.’ He called the Church to ‘stand in solidarity with those most vulnerable and marginalised people in the world’ whom poverty and injustice have robbed of their dignity, and suggested that we could do so by seeking to ‘evaluate, first of all, and then to work against those policies which impinge upon and oppress [the poor] so starkly.’

For Muhammad Imran, education officer for Islamic Relief, a key point was that we don’t need to be experts to understand or get involved with trade justice: ‘the bottom line is that something very simple, simply unfair and unjust is occurring.’

Pushpanath Krish-namurthy, campaign executive on OXFAM’s Make Trade Fair campaign, shared his experience of motivating marginalised groups overseas to act for trade justice. He inspired with the story of a group of Indian women who had lost their livelihoods because of unaccountable liberalisation. They made up their first petition and collected 14,000 signatures from their village alone.