Trade Justice Action

More than 25,000, including church groups, converge on Westminster to demand ‘trade justice not free trade’ at the end of the Global Week of Action.

Churches, dioceses and deaneries chartering buses, trains and planes will ensure that church members make up a large proportion of the 150,000-200,000 people expected in Edinburgh on July 2. Four days before the G8 Summit opens at Gleneagles, supporters intend to put a white band around Edinburgh in support of the Make Poverty History campaign calling for trade justice, debt cancellation and more and better aid.

Church groups were also at the heart of a major demonstration for global trade justice in April, when 25,000 campaigners converged on Westminster.

Ronan Keating, Beverley Knight, Vanessa Redgrave and Pete Postlethwaite were among celebrity campaigners in Westminster Abbey before an overnight candlelit vigil in Whitehall and an early morning march on Downing Street.

The culmination of a Global Week of Action involving 10 million people in 80 countries, campaigners were demanding “trade justice not free trade”. The event was the first in a series aimed at putting pressure on rich country governments to reform the global trading system so that it fights poverty.

The Bishop of Pontefract discusses the effects of trade liberalisation with a Senegalese farmer.

Three UK bishops who took part in the Week – the Bishop of Exeter, Michael Langrish, the Bishop of Pontefract, Tony Robinson, and the Bishop of Chichester, John Hind – had firsthand experience of the plight of poor farmers in a world of unbridled trade liberalisation. They recently returned from a fact-finding visit to Senegal with Christian Aid.

“The farmers are working hard to help themselves,” said Bishop Tony Robinson, “but they face so many obstacles, most of which are beyond their control.”

On top of recurring drought, locusts, epidemics and lack of technology, unfair trade rules mean that cheap imports can flood their markets and price them out of business.

“We saw for ourselves how unregulated trade can be so deeply damaging to a person’s life and hopes,” said Michael Langrish.

When anti-poverty campaigners surrounded the G8 meeting in Birmingham in 1998, it was a catalyst in putting on the public agenda the Jubilee 2000 campaign to reduce the debts of poor countries.

Anglican Communion Primates’ meeting in Newry in February received a report on the ministry of African churches among people living with the consequences of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The Primates reaffirmed the commitment of the Church to achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which aim to halve the proportion of people living in poverty by 2015.

The Church of England joined the Trade Justice Movement after a vote in General Synod last year.

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