The African Fair Trade Symposium
International trade can be a powerful tool for eliminating poverty, if it answers to criterias derived from justice and equity. But Africa suffers from the dumping of products from industrialised countries, rather than any increase of its exports. The situation could worsen with the negotiation of new trade agreements.
Fair Trade represents an opportunity to revert this tendency, by bringing closer producers and consumers at different levels, and because it proposes other trade rules than those that are currently applied. But the African continent is badly represented within Fair Trade at international level (about 15%).
This is why the Fair Trade workshop of the Workgroup on a socio-economy of solidarity has taken the initiative to organise in April 2006, with networks operating in Africa, this first African Fair Trade Symposium, which will bring together for the first time the African actors in Fair Trade.
It will be an unprecedent opportunity to consider the following issues:
- Balance of 30 years of Fair Trade in Africa: exchange of experiences and analysis.
- The impact of FT on local development of Africa
- The potential of Inter-African FT in the perspective of the Regional Integration processes
- FT and international trade negotiations (Cotonou agreements and WTO)