Strategic Dialogue on Commodities, Trade, Poverty and Sustainable Development

12th – 14th June 2005 • Co-organised with International Institute on Environment and Development (IIED)

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The crisis in agricultural commodities should be at the centre of debates on poverty and environmental degradation. Dealing with chronic rural poverty and major ecosystem impacts of agriculture both require a new look at how commodity markets work or fail, and how trade negotiations as well as public and private sector policies can, in the realities of the 21st century, introduce fairness, justice and sustainability into these markets. And yet, the issue is largely ignored by recent high profile initiatives to tackle poverty in developing countries. This is the context for this strategic dialogue.

Civil society proposals to improve governance of primary commodity markets for sustainability have clustered around four broad approaches. First, environmental and conservation groups seek the application of commodity stewardship, whereby markets can work to increase the demand for sustainably produced products, through segregated supply chains or through preferential access to markets or to finance. Elsewhere, a cluster of organisations is revisiting supply management to reduce oversupply and price volatility, focusing on multilateral public policy and the lessons from the collapse of International Commodity Agreements (ICAs). Third, a group of farm and development organisations is concerned about growing corporate concentration in commodity markets and the impact of imbalances of market power on the share of wealth finding its way back to primary producers. This group is focused on competition policy and corporate accountability. Finally a fourth group argues that the elimination of trade barriers and distortions in the context of ongoing WTO negotiations will increase world prices and provide new trading opportunities to developing countries. The WTO 1 August decision and its Annex on agriculture address some of those issues, notably through provisions on export subsidies, domestic support, tropical products, and trade preferences.

This three day strategic dialogue organised by ICTSD and IIED with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, sought to bring together the different strands of debate around commodity trade and production to explore the opportunities for achieving sustainability and poverty reduction. It built on a first dialogue, held in Windsor UK in July 2004 which focused on the multilateral trade agenda, especially the WTO Doha round and linking the negotiations to other areas of policy necessary for trade liberalization to realize its potential towards improvement of the lives of the world’s poor. The specific objectives of this meeting were threefold:

Exchange information on each organisation’s current activities;

Identify elements of a pro-poor, pro-sustainable development agenda for commodities;

Develop joint vision, strategies for taking the reform agenda forward, and potential future collaboration.