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Civil society in the country has joined the band of international trade activists seeking an end to unfair trade at the make or break talks at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting in Mexican resort city of Cancun.
The 146-nation WTO opened its five-day meeting on Wednesday with serious divisions on a host of disputes, topped by agricultural subsidies in the United States and Europe.
About 5,000 activists from across the world are in Mexico to bolster poor countries’ fight for fair trade.
Malawi Economic Justice Network (Mejn) deputy national coordinator Mavuto Bamusi, whose group has more than 70 civil society organisations, said thousands of signatures have been collected as part of an international campaign to break rich countries’ grip on global trade.
“We have managed to collect 20,000 signatures countrywide despite entering the campaign late,” said Bamusi.
He said the signatures will be added to a list from other countries to emphasise the argument that WTO policies do not benefit everyone but a few rich countries only.
Bamusi said the campaign is mainly concerned with the style of richer nations, who through unfair trade policies, force their poor counterparts to open up their markets to compete with goods from the rest of the world when the poor themselves have no access to better market because of trade barriers.
Said Bamusi: “Issues of subsidies removal and the concept of trade liberalisation forced on poor countries are some of the concerns of this global campaign.”
Zambia has collected about half a million signatures in the exercise known as Make Trade Fair Campaign or The Big Noise, said Bamusi.
A delegation led by Commerce and Industry Minister Sam Mpasu is at the meeting to present Malawi’s case.
Violent protests have become a staple of international trade and finance meetings since rioting at a WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999. Italian police shot dead a protester at a summit of industrialised nations in Genoa in 2001.
According to a Reuters report British development charity Oxfam on Thursday called on political leaders at the WTO talks to commit themselves to changing Europe’s agricultural subsidy regime, which, it said was biased toward helping the bloc’s richest producers most.
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