USCCB - Global Poverty | International Trade

International Trade and our Catholic Response

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What is the issue?
International trade is the means by which goods, services, money and know how cross national borders through buying and selling according to certain rules and regulations. Trade can bring about good in our world, allowing the fruits of human labor to multiply and bring just rewards. An exchange between parties, if fair, can be of mutual benefit and increase human well-being, enabling people to support their families in dignity.

Global Trade and Agricultural Policies
In the Church’s vision, economic life should be guided by a moral framework that respects the life and dignity of every person. In this video, Fr. Andrew Small, Policy Advisor for Latin America and Global Trade at USCCB, explains how trade and agricultural policies sometimes fall short of this vision—and what Catholics can do about it.

How does trade injustice affect real people?

Photo by Lane Hartill/CRS

Rasmata Sawadogo is a rice farmer in Burkina Faso. In developing countries like Burkina Faso, small farmers often teeter on the edge of survival, struggling to compete with much more efficient, highly subsidized, large-scale farmers in developed countries. The recent global food crisis has exacerbated Rasmata’s bleak situation.

Although the increased food prices allow farmers to sell rice at a higher price, the cost of fertilizer and other farming inputs has also increased. Because Burkina is landlocked, the country must import many of its goods. The high cost of trucking these goods from ports in Ivory Coast, Togo, and Benin is passed on to people like Rasmata. There have been riots over the high cost of food and fuel.

CRS has seen firsthand, through its many development programs, the damaging impact of the crisis on the poorest people. Families eat fewer meals, even skipping days, and children stop going to school to save on education fees to pay for food.

The situation of people like Rasmata is one reason why USCCB has urged preferential treatment for products from developing countries through trade preference programs. Such trade preferences can allow their goods to be more competitive on the global market and gives people like Rasmata an opportunity to support her family. Equipping Rasmata with better skills and equipment to increase her agricultural output goes hand in hand with allowing access to her products in U.S. and other developed-country markets.

Trade Facts

Global trade is worth $14 trillion.
International assistance is worth $100,000 a minute; international trade is worth $10 million a minute (100 times as much).
The World Bank estimates that if Africa increased exports by 1 per cent it would generate $70 billion a year – compared with $14.6 billion provided through international assistance and debt relief.
Rich countries generate 2/3 of world exports. Developing countries with almost four-fifths of the world’s population generate 1/3.

Governmental financial support to agricultural producers in developed countries adds up to about $280 billion per year (OECD estimates, 2006), about three times the level of 2006 global development assistance (World Bank, 2005)