WTO Ministerial Conference

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:30 pm on 17 September 2003.

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Photo of Patricia Hewitt Patricia Hewitt Secretary of State, Department of Trade and Industry 12:30, 17 September 2003

It is wonderful to hear the head of the National Farmers Union described as a Labour stooge.

The reforms were described as revolutionary, and nobody would have believed them possible if we had predicted them only six or eight months ago. I do not think that anyone in the House or, indeed, the NGOs should talk down the significance of the reforms for agriculture policy. They may not do everything, but they go a very long way indeed towards remove the trade-distorting subsidies that do so much damage to the developing world. Having made that enormous step forward in Europe, we are indeed entitled to expect other developed countries to match the reforms, particularly in export credits and food aid.

On the issue of transparency, one of the things that I welcomed at Cancun was the extent to which developing countries in the first two or three days of talks said how much better the process was than at Doha. Of course, it was streets ahead of where we were in Seattle. That, unfortunately, was not sustained in the final days, and it is one of the lessons that need to be learned. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that nobody should regard the breakdown of the talks as a cause for celebration, although some signs of celebration, especially among the smaller developing countries, reflected the fact that the developing countries themselves were much stronger. The dynamics and balance of power in the WTO have undoubtedly been altered.

I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman about the advocacy fund. Developing countries do not want to be given money to hire other countries' experts—they want their own people to be trained and supported so that they can negotiate more effectively. That is precisely what we have been doing through the significant investment that I described in trade-related capacity building.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned my visit last week to Honduras, where I was able to see for myself, as I have done in other countries, the effect of abrupt market opening—in this case, 10 years ago, under pressure from the IMF, to subsidised rice imports from the United States. That abrupt market liberalisation—that opening to subsidised imports—destroyed the rice farmers of Honduras for many, many years. The rice farmers are beginning to come back into production, thanks to a change in the market rules made by the Honduran Government, underlining the importance of the discussions that we had in Cancun on special and differential treatment and different approaches for products of special concern to developing countries.

Finally, on the Department for International Development, I remind the hon. Gentleman that in the days of the Conservative Government, Baroness Chalker, who I thought was an excellent Minister for Overseas Development, was neither in this House, nor in the Cabinet. I will certainly not take lectures on international development from a member of the party that cut international aid budgets from where we had left them in 1979 to such an extent that developing countries lost out to the tune of £20 billion. We will deliver on development, and we will continue to try to deliver on fair trading rules that will benefit developing countries, as well as the rest of the world.