Q:Oxfam's campaigning for fairer
trade rules and your emergency work are well known. But you are
also heavily involved in ground-level work on trade and business
development. What are these activities?
A: The purpose of our programmes on the ground
is to help vulnerable and poor people build more sustainable
livelihoods. For instance, we work directly with small farmers'
coffee cooperatives in the developing world. Through funding and
training, we help raise capacity to access markets on better terms.
As part of these activities we consider fair trade products as a
very important tool for cooperatives to differentiate their
products and improve quality, as well as to understand marketing
and how the supply chain works.
Q: What major challenges do you
face?
A: We are currently reviewing our "five-year
plan". There is growing demand for us to go further in helping
developing countries with trade policy at the national policy
level. One reason is that policy-makers know that organizations
like Oxfam are progressive and trust their advice. What's on offer
in traditional channels is not always sufficient or adequate. It is
not enough just to train trade negotiators, for example, or to
argue generally for freer trade. One clear example: developing
countries were promised a detailed assessment of the implications
of the Doha Development Agenda on their industries, but there is
still no country-by-country analysis of its impact.
So the demand on us to offer more training and provide policy
analysis is enormous, but is this really Oxfam's role in trade
development? The humanitarian side of Oxfam has faced the same
pressures: since the 1970s some emergency NGOs have found
themselves asked to provide essential health services. In trade,
the trend now is to ask us to provide essential services too. They
ask questions such as, can you propose a new label for textiles?
Can you advise us on how to build a generic pharmaceutical
industry? Can you help us develop a coffee trademark?
Even if it is tempting to try and fill this gap, we do not have
the capacity to do so on our own. Moreover, our long-term priority
is to build capacity of NGOs and trade union groups in developing
countries - not governments. To ensure pro-development outcomes, it
is crucial for civil society to be able to demand a pro-poor trade
policy at home.
Q:How much do you work with
business?
A: We have been collaborating with business for
a very long time. Sometimes this is through funding from business
for projects, but we are much more interested in working with
corporations to promote improved business practices. For instance,
we produced a report together with Unilever on their practices in
Indonesia. In other cases, we put pressure on companies through
public campaigning. For instance, we have criticized the
pharmaceutical sector for pricing antiretrovirals out of poor
people's reach in most developing countries. It is a question of
finding the right approach. We are certainly not anti-business,
because we know that developing countries need a vibrant private
sector. But we think that the private sector needs to do much more
to promote development and that it is good business to do so.
Q:Why is Oxfam involved in the WTO
debates?
A: We launched our "Make Trade Fair" campaign
because we thought that world trade rules were rigged against the
interests of the world's poor. As a result, the potential for trade
to help people get out of poverty was completely undermined. Some
governments in developing countries have also asked Oxfam to help
them with WTO issues. They do not feel they get enough information
to keep up with the negotiations and need political and media
support to put development issues at the forefront of the Doha
talks.
But we are not concerned just about WTO rules. The regional and
bilateral trade agreements are also causing us concern because of
their adverse impact on development. For example, we see WTO
flexibilities on access to medicines being undone by regional and
bilateral agreements. Then there are the "orphan" issues such as
investment rules, anti-trust, taxes, etc., which are very important
for development, but are not even discussed at the multilateral
level.
Q:Oxfam's campaigning style for the
general public - such as the celebrities and milk surplus photos -
is criticized privately within the trade community for its
simplifications. How do you meet such criticisms?
A: I reply with my own challenge: what are you
doing to educate the wider public about trade? Public education on
trade and development is crucial but it is not easy. Governments
and international organizations aren't doing enough of it. This is
why protectionism and mercantilism still prevail. Only 2% of the
Dutch public, for example, know what WTO is. What trade experts
don't sometimes grasp is that reports full of statistics are
important to inform the trade community but fail to raise the
attention of the wider public. If you want to raise public
attention about such a complex issue, you have to come up with
simple, striking and engaging messages. The key challenge is to
energize people to act and make them realize that they can make a
difference by making different consumption, investment and
political choices. Fair trade products are one very useful
educational tool that we use. The fair trade concept will never
completely replace mainstream trade channels, but it helps
consumers understand how supply chains are working and what is
going on in developing countries, and empower them to do something
it. But we need to go beyond the fair trade niche to see global
change happen, for instance with regard to agricultural subsidy
reform, and this is one of the core objectives of our public
campaigning.
Q:You came to Oxfam from the
Inter-American Development Bank. How has this previous experience
helped you?
A: I am probably more open to dialogue and
collaboration. There are many hard-working, competent and concerned
people working within these organizations and there is a lot of
expertise from which NGOs like Oxfam can benefit. Having worked in
multilateral institutions also helps me understand where people on
the other side of the table are coming from, what political
constraints they face and what role they can or cannot play in the
trade arena.
For more information about Oxfam, see http://www.oxfam.org/en