Christian Aid's campaigning improves

By Alex Singleton | 13 July 2005

I've been critical of Christian Aid's campaigning against free trade. So I was pleased that we seem to have successfully encouraged them to rethink their campaign. Their newspaper adverts appear to have stopped calling for "trade justice, not free trade". They are now calling for "trade justice, not enforced free trade".

This is a much more reasonable position for them to take. Given that free trade is something that is beneficial regardless of what other countries do, it is right that rich countries should open their borders to the goods of other countries regardless of what poor countries do. The abolition of European and American protection should be unilateral. Instead of giving top-down aid with conditionality imposed, we should move to more bottom-up approaches to aid.

On the other hand, Christian Aid's campaign is still misguided in an important respect. They argue that poor countries should impose protectionism on their peoples. Protectionism helps keep poor people poor. But at least their campaign is better than it was.