Johann Hari: We can still make poverty history

The world's most deadly city this week was Geneva, a civilised town of smart suits and elegant fountains

This week, politicians gathered in a city at the heart of the developed world and took decisions that will result in mass death. Asked to name this place and this decision, most of us would think instinctively of the trashed cities of Lebanon, bombed on orders from Tel Aviv. A few would think of the ongoing genocide in Darfur, directed from Khartoum. But sober studies by Nobel-prize winning economists have shown that the world's most deadly city this week was Geneva, a civilised town of smart suits, gushing fountains and an unhealthy number of Smurfs in every shop window. (Don't ask me why).

The world's politicians, gathered at the World Trade Organisation in Switzerland, have finally cremated the "development round" promised to the world's poorest people five years ago. (Or, to give it its full title, "this trade thingy" - copyright Tony Blair 2006). In the weeks following the massacre in New York, the World Trade Organisation gathered not far from Ground Zero and pledged that this time, the global trade talks were going to work differently. Now they were going to put the needs of the world's poorest people - the two billion human beings who live on less than a dollar a day - first.

The leaders of the poorest countries dared to hope. For every pound the rich world gives to poor people in aid, it causes seven pounds of damage through unfair trade rules. Think of a woman breeding chickens for sale in Ghana. When she gets to her local market, she discovers that she is competing against frozen chickens grown, fed and shipped in from the rich world. These chickens are being flogged off far below the market price, because rich governments paid their farmers fat subsidies to breed and feed the birds and fly them here. She cannot compete. Her little business goes bust before it even begins.

And it gets worse. She cannot go and work for (say) a chicken factory or a field growing wheat to sell back to us, because we erect massive tariff walls to keep them out. We turn a potential bread-basket into a dust bowl. It's not hard to see how Doha could have delivered for her.

These agricultural subsidies have very little support back home, and would be easy to erode: the poverty-stricken recipients currently include Chevron, Texaco, Elizabeth Windsor and the Duke of Marlborough. For a few flickering moments, it seemed like the Doha round would eliminate some of this. The Make Poverty History movement rose across the developed world to force our politicians to act.

But Doha swiftly morphed into something contrary to its original remit. By the end it was offering a package so unfair that aid agencies like Oxfam were saying it would actually do harm to the poor if it was passed. Due to poor-world horror and rich-world intransigence, Doha's life support finally stuttered to a halt in the clear Swiss air this week.

So what went wrong? The problem seems to have resided partly in the ideology of the WTO itself. There are three broad-brush ways to organise world trade. The first is free trade. This is where all countries - rich and poor - abolish their tariff walls and their subsidies, and exchange goods as equals on the free market. An Algerian can sell his goods to an Alabaman without hitting any tariffs, and vice versa.

The second is fair trade. This is where the rich world abolishes its tariffs and subsidies, but the poor are allowed to keep some. It means the Ghanaian chicken farmer would be able to sell to us, but a chicken farmer from Surrey would have to pay a fat fee to sell anything back.

This is based on a moral as well as an economic basis: a starving African has a greater need for development than a person in Surrey. Every country that has ever climbed the Everest of growth to become rich has protected its indigenous markets in this way until they were robust enough to face international competition. For example, the US had average industrial tariffs of 40 per cent between the 1820 and 1945 - far higher than anything Africa is asking for today.

The third system - the one that mostly prevails at the moment - should be dubbed rich-world protectionism. This is where the rich swaddle themselves in expensive subsidies and tariffs but the poor are rarely allowed to. Every major economic study shows this approach starves the Ghanaian chicken farmer, the West African cotton farmer and millions more.

The WTO was designed to move the world towards free trade - but the problem is that this philosophy sees fair trade and rich-world protectionism as equally evil. To them, protection for a Ghanaian farmer is as bad as protection for Elizabeth Windsor. At every stage of the Doha negotiations, every time the rich world grudgingly agreed to a cut in its tariffs and subsidies, the poor world had to agree a cut in its own paltry equivalent.

Okay, so the US and EU will ditch export subsidies, which make up 3 per cent of our agricultural budget? Right, then India and Brazil need to crowbar open their economies to our goods - and allow hundreds of thousands of their farmers to be plunged into unemployment. One rich world negotiator summarised this attitude clearly: "There needs to be blood on the floor from everyone."

But the problem is that the rich world blood consisted of fewer subsidies to Chevron and Texaco, who can take it. The poor world blood consisted of starving kids, who can't. A real "development round" would have acknowledged the different starting points of the WTO members, and recognised that it defeats the whole purpose if the poor have to make the same sacrifices as the rich.

And yet I cannot join the gloating on the grave of Doha staged by some. The effect of its death will not be the creation of a fair trade system next week. As one Oxfam spokesman explained, "It means all of the injustices in world trade that we have now are going to stay indefinitely. It means the US and the EU will continue to subsidise and dump their products on world markets, and means farmers in poor countries will stay poor." And die in their millions of the predictable, preventable diseases of poverty I saw scarring Central Africa recently, like malaria.

Gnarled conservatives will use this as another reason to declare that Make Poverty History was a naïve delusion, just "kids screaming in the mud". But the anti-slavery movement did not give up with one defeat, nor a hundred. From the rubble of Doha, we have no choice but to see an opportunity to start building the case for a fair trade alternative to a blinkered WTO not fit for purpose. The one billion people going to bed hungry tonight because they are locked out of the global economy don't have time for despair.

j.hari@independent.co.uk