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WDM trade successes
The World Development Movement (WDM) has had many trade successes over the last three and a half decades:
- 1970 WDM's first campaign secures protected access to the markets of the newly formed European Community for developing country sugar producers.
- 1981 WDM organises a mass lobby of Parliament with 10,000 people calling for fairer trade rules.
- 1992 WDM's Stop the Stitch Up campaign unites Bangladeshi textile workers, trade unions and NGOs to call for the removal of textile quotas for the world's poorest countries.
- 1996 The proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment threatens sweeping new powers for big business. WDM is key to the global campaign that defeated it.
- 1999 Massive protests at the Seattle WTO Ministerial Meeting call for fundamental WTO reform and lead to the talks collapsing.
- 2001 WDM launches a campaign which exposes big business' grab for services in the developing world under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). To date, only one Least Developed Country has made a GATS offer.
- 2003/4 WTO talks in Mexico collapse after developing countries refuse to negotiate four new issues that are being pushed by the EU. In response to campaigning by WDM and other Trade Justice Movement (TJM) members, the UK is the first European country to call for these new issues to be dropped. Eventually, as a result of developing country opposition and global campaigning, three "new issues" are dropped from the current WTO negotiating agenda.
- 2004 Over 8000 campaigners cast their "Votes for Trade Justice" outside the Labour Party Conference chanting "Free trade is not fair trade".
- 2005 WDM's Colludo campaign forces the UK Government to stop imposing policies like privatisation and trade liberalisation on poor countries in return for aid. As TJM pressure mounts, the UK also agrees not to push new free trade agreements - Economic Partnership Agreements - currently being negotiated by the EU with former colonies.
The fight for fairer trade continues. Our current campaigning focusses on three main areas:
- Trading rules must put people first: We are calling for strong international rules that put people's needs before free trade.
- Reform must address the fundamental problems: We are calling for the reform agenda to address the fundamental inequalities that exist in the WTO.
- Ongoing negotiations must be opened up: We are calling for poor countries to have easy access to all the different negotiations - 19 at present - currently taking place at the WTO.
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