Received this week from Make Poverty History:

The European Union and the USA have made it totally certain that there won’t be a world trade deal that will help make poverty history at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) this year. The world trade talks at the WTO have hit a new crisis and only a few days ago were suspended. No one knows yet for just how long.

The responsibility for the WTO failing the world’s poor rests with the governments of rich countries. They have not shown the political will to deliver trade justice and make trade work for poor people.

The WTO talks may have been put on ice, but they are not the only trade negotiations the UK takes part in.

Last year, in response to your calls to make poverty history, the UK Government promised to make trade work for the poor. Yet it is on course for a devastating act of betrayal. Together with its partners in Europe, the UK is part of a push to have some of the poorest nations on the planet sign up to grossly unfair trade deals.

The deals are called Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) and we have to act fast. Poor farmers and vulnerable producers will be forced into unfair competition with rich nations. The lives of 750 million of the world’s poorest people in Africa and poor countries worldwide are in the balance.

Take action today and send an email to Alistair Darling, the UK Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. Ask him to use his influence to stop these deals going ahead, to listen to the serious concerns of poor countries and work with those countries to develop new deals that will help deliver trade justice.
To send your email to Alistair Darling click here now.

Thank you,

Trade Justice Movement
A key network within Make Poverty History 2005

It makes me angry to think rich nations are trying to worm their way out of promises made a little over a year go. It makes me angry, but sadly, it does not surprise me. It is still true, as it has been for the last 12 months, that EVERY 3 SECONDS a child dies unnecessarily due, in some way, to poverty.

This is a crime of inaction, a crime of greed, a crime that this country, and the countries of the western ‘civilised’ world, sit back and allow to happen. The only reason, the root reason, can only be because we do not care. If we did, this would not still be happening.

This is just plain wrong and I can’t see what is holding things up, why aid can’t be more readily available, why trade deals cannot automatically be fairer, why GB and USA do not lead the way in righting this injustice. Instead they insist our rich workers must get richer, and others must continue in their deathly poverty.

A year ago we found campaigning and writing works, we made a difference. Today, write that email or send that letter, I just wish I could do a lot more!