hi everybody and welcome to this first interview of what I'm hoping to become
an entire series on development issues related interviews. earlier this
morning I went to Frankfort to speak to Francois Baird who's the founder of the
Fair Play movement - maybe you can explain a little bit to us what the main issue
of the Fair Play movement is what it's all about -- mostly we stand on the
side of the people to try and ameliorate some of the effects that irresponsible
trade practices have on jobs and development in smaller countries. the
Fair Play movement is really involved in fighting what we call crocodile trade
those are predatory trade practices for instance dumping selling
below the cost of production or even below the sales price, but by predatory
trade practice we mean much more than that
I'll give you a practical example. when in South Africa you buy imported frozen
chicken pieces what you will find is that the origin of chicken could be in
one pack could be 11 different countries so there's no traceability and we think
that's a risk and that's a pretty trade practice because South African chicken
producers have to have full traceability these are some of the things that people
in Europe don't see because you know eating patterns in poultry for instance
has changed. in Europe people eat the white meat they don't eat the brown meat
the bone-in chicken pieces. as a result they sit on a mountain of the stuff and
what do they do when markets like Russia close their markets? they simply go and
sell it at any price they can get. but of course it doesn't reach the consumer at
that price right it's not as though the consumer benefits. the consumer pays
marginally less than the price they pay for South African chicken and in the
process South African producers are put under
pressure and you know what happens? it's not the big producers who suffer most
it's the small producers, small black producers go out of business straight
away. it's the same in the sugar industry when there's pressure on the sugar price
it's not the big producers who go out of business. it's the small black farmers who
go out of business and that's why we're very worried about the effect that these
trade practices have. the Fair Play movement is not against free trade but
we are for the rule of law and unfortunately the World Trade
Organization is geared for the big people, right, big corporates, big
countries who abuse their market power and force producers in smaller countries
out of business and then they can charge whatever they like
so in Ghana for instance they've done that very successfully. there is no
Ghanaian chicken industry of any substance left. the scale has become very
small. why? because people were able to export to Ghana unfettered. now we don't
think it makes sense for instance for Europe on the one
end to spend millions of euros supporting development in Africa to try
and create jobs and then spend million millions of euros on subsidies to a
farming sector that destroys jobs and food security. on chicken for instance
people people say yes but what about the u.s. yes they dump in South Africa but
they've actually made an agreement to say we'll will contain it to
sixty five thousand tonnes, right. which is nothing so it's possible for
governments to actually be responsible the EU is irresponsible and at the
moment, the EU is not a big player but forty imports are now 40 percent of the
market in South Africa it's the biggest producer of chicken
-- when you speak about the south african poultry industry you're actually
merging two things that seem to be quite far apart. you spoke about the little
black producer and the big poultry industry that was just reported that it
was more productive than even the European -- the issue is not
competitiveness of course the big producers will be very competitive, they
have the latest technology. they keep up with world standards and in fact as I
explained earlier the packaging and hygiene requirements are
very high. but remember how they remain competitive and how they solve the
problem. they have to cut jobs and that's what first got us into this. you know
when I realized that in some areas in South Africa where these chicken
production facilities are, unemployment is over 40 percent. so if you lose a job
there it's not as though you can walk down the street and find another job
there is nothing and when we started doing some research in the local
communities we found that all the negative indicators are growing. so
family violence, lack of school attendance, all of these things started
tracking exactly when they shut the production facility down. so yes on the
one hand it affects small farmers most they go first
right, because this is a dynamic situation. it's not as though they
started overnight. first they test the market. they get away with it. then they
dump in the market and by the way three European countries have been found
guilty of dumping chicken in South Africa: Germany Netherlands and the UK. so
it is not as though we are fighting sort of tilting at windmills. the problem is
what is the punishment for dumping? there is no punishment effectively
the process at the WTO is so slow you can be found guilty in 2013 or 2014 and
the first time a real tariff is raised against you is in 2018 by which time
thousands of people have lost their jobs that is simply unacceptable. so we are
for free trade but free trade according to the rules and what we're saying is
you don't necessarily need more rules. you need tougher enforcement punishment
faster enforcement and faster processes because you know while they are sitting
dozing off at the WTO in Geneva people are scrambling to try and keep their
jobs in Africa and that's simply not compatible. -- WTO is not not really guilty
but guilty of neglecting and not getting involved.but there's other governments
there's the trading blocks, there's the u.s. there's Europe we spoke about and
there's also South African government because obviously there's somebody
responsible for letting the stuff in. -- you know what I've come to realize over the
last two years is that there's a reason why government is not called management
because for instance the South African government had a lapse in applying the
appropriate sugar tariffs for several months about 18 months ago last year. as
a result of which you can imagine the big corporations were right in there
taking advantage of the lapse on the side of the government and we were
forced as fairplay movement to take on coca-cola about walking through
that door. in a sense you can't blame them because they're not doing something
illegal and that's part of the problem. dumping is not illegal. dumping is simply
frowned upon. so now the South African government has
imposed higher tariffs on sugar and higher tariffs on chicken for three
years and it'll decline again but it doesn't solve the problem. this
problem must be solved by firstly applying the rules of dumping more
strictly, being faster about it and I think the sanctions should be much much
much higher because if you do this it's not by accident. it's deliberate. so if
you're a businessman and you know you're going to be selling below your local
selling price or below your cost of production it is only because you
colluding with the government. you know there's an old joke. they say in Africa
the farmers farm the land but in Europe they farm the government and it's
because politicians quite naturally want to get votes and they go for the easy
wins but the world has changed and we can see worldwide for instance the
impacts of these decisions are now coming home. immigration from Africa has
become a problem for Europe but that's because of European trade policies and
aid policies are not creating business, jobs and economic growth in Africa -- maybe you
can clarify who is responsible on each side the African governments? why are
they not closing the door? it's not I guess just sort of slowness in
response, it's also a s tructural thing that they are trading basically maybe it's a
wrong word here that they say juggling different things when they want to talk
to the big guys in the US and Europe they want to have certain contacts and
who's taking the brunt is the the small farmers -- you put your finger on the
problem. it's big versus small. so if you small government even South Africa is a
small government compared to the European Union so when you negotiate
with the European Union do you know what they do? they say well if you don't allow
us and you don't look the other way so we can dump chicken we're going to stop
your wine from coming in. so it's brutal and I think that brutality is
what's hurting Europe. so there has to be a realignment Europe must decide whether
it wants to be moral player in the world,whether it wants Africa to be
successful and whether it is going to be more reasonable and sensible in dealing
with smaller countries. a country like Ivory Coast for instance, the moment they
close their market their local industry recovered. South Africa doesn't have
to close its market but the same rules must apply, the same packaging
traceability. for instance South Africa has just had the deadliest case of
listeriosis. It is the biggest listeriosis case in the world,nearly 200 people died
the question is where did that deadly strain of listeriosis get into the food
chain? could it be that it came in product from Brazil for instance where
we know they're extremely corrupt and extremely unreliable when it comes to
food safety? and it's not because we think so. it's because they themselves
have arrested people and thrown them in jail for those offenses. so this is not
make believe. this is real issue and so if it's a real issue the government has to
play its role and so this is not a simple silver bullet you know we're
going to do one thing and everything changes. what you have to do and that's
what Fair Play is trying to get everyone to do is to say firstly in
Africa and other developing countries the local governments must coordinate
their departments better. for instance Food Safety Agency, they must come up
with innovations I'll give you a practical example, why would Africa with
a big sugar industry import sugar based packaging it should be making it
themselves why does every country not have an
ethanol mandate? the South African government has had an ethanol mandate
lying on the shelf for five years now when will it be implemented? so it's
execution on the side of African governments, its policy on the side of
the big trading blocks and it is coordination and ensuring that there's a
way of speeding up redress and assistance to the victims of dumping and
other predatory trade practices so that you create a more competitive free trade
world where the small countries, the small producers are able on an equitable
basis to compete against the bigger countries.you can't have a situation
where a competitive industry is destroyed due to policy. you have to
create a situation where a competitive industry is able to compete on a level
playing field and that's all we are saying. we're saying same rules applied
with sensible approaches and coordinated policy so that development takes place
in the smaller blocks and that they're not bullied into destroying their own
business by the big players. -- so you're basically asking you need more of an
international governance system that's more transparent and that shows what's
actually happening. so actually the profits are shifting in a way to big
corporations somewhere and you can't really blame them because the level
field is not plain, there's not enough signs on that playing field that
regulates it. so maybe you can speak a little bit more about the whole
cause and effect chain that you sort of sketched in the beginning. what's
the big thing is the the root causes of migration. that's where everybody seems
to be scared about all of a sudden for the last three four years. I mean Trump
now blocking the border is calling in the guards and
how do you see that what's happening, what's the cause and effect
until these people stand and want to cross the border to sort of follow where
the profits are going -- the president of Ghana pointed out that young Africans in
high unemployment areas have always migrated to find work
right now they migrating to Europe, the Europeans are very worried about
receiving Africans whatever the basis for that worry may be but they don't
want Africans flooding Europe whether that's a good or a bad thing
I'm not going to get into the politics of it. all I'm going to say is from a
Fairplay movement perspective: if you don't want people from outside your
borders flooding your own country in search of work it would be a very
sensible thing to assist them to find work in their own countries. our patron is
Justice Richard Goldstone who was the first prosecutor at The Hague - yeah, I remember - and
he made the case that there needs to be a legal route to find faster redress
because should dumping not be illegal --- in the last couple of years what I've been
thinking about is that the typical way of doing politics is the legal route
I mean Parliaments make laws internationally you make trade agreements
they become laws in a way even. what do you think is it's there may be a time
where you need to find a different way of actually setting up moving things in
politics? I mean on a small scale you have behavioural considerations how do
you actually lodge people to do what you can't really force them to do? how about
international things is it about naming and shaming is that gonna work is this
sort of thing? -- you know we we would like to see more transparency
it would be nice to find out who actually makes the money here because
someone is making a lot of money for very little effort aided and abetted by
government, aided and abetted by African governments, by developing country
governments and by the country of origin government, aided and abetted by policies
that enable these enormous profits for no value-added at the cost of jobs in
the developing world. so transparency would be good. but we think there's also
a case to be made to say if you're going to have regulations and there is no real
sanction we all know that doesn't work so I think it is a basket of solutions
that we have to look at and I think it's time to take it more seriously and I
think it's time for the World Trade Organization to actually pitch up for
work for once and work on behalf of the smaller nations and the smaller
producers looking for new ways to assist smaller producers. for heaven's
sake the world is full of technology now it must be possible to create value
chain traceability and once you have value chain traceability a lot of this
these problems could be managed much better. so we think it's time for the
global trade system to be shaken up to be better enabled with technology to
become more transparent and certainly to become a little more aggressive in
dealing with transgressors. --- so the regional trade intra African regional
trade initiatives that's not going to really crack the nut in the long run is
it just a small wave? -- you know, big and small will always be in
adversarial positions. so even intra-african trade when you have the
big African countries trading with small African countries they also abuse the
system. that's why I believe technology, traceability, all of this will assist and
by the way just think about it, proper traceability in the developing
world and developed world across the globe of value chains will actually make your
food safer, will ensure that you know where it comes from who produced it, how
they produced it, will ensure that when you have trade moving into countries and
out of countries that you know who's behind it and what that trade is
actually worth. so there's an enormous benefit to bring in technology into
play here and we don't think enough has been done with that
what about digitalization I mean there is huge money flows there with Amazon
Netflix all these sort of things in the media business that we see. how does that
affect agricultural trade in a way? is there something on the
horizon maybe with dark clouds even? --- actually I think there's a very exciting
possibility and that is that if you bring value chain traceability through
technology which is digitization into the market what you're going to have is
transparency. so the cotton industry in South Africa for instance brought value
chain traceability in, with technology and they have grown their
revenue from 21 million rand to over three billion four years later. why?
because all of a sudden everything was transparent. costs went down across the
value chain and consumers responded very well because you can now go to the store at
see where your shirt comes from, where was it produced, where was the cotton produced, who did the weaving and the spinning and the design and
and the spinning and the design, everything that went into it. so once you get value chain traceability I think a
lot of these problems can be solved provided governments are willing to also
enforce the rules on a fair equitable basis. --- so financial flows as well or is
that maybe pushing it too much? -- No, I think financial flows as well. it's free
trade. we're not saying stop people from training. we're simply saying make sure
that it's transparent. make sure that you know how the finances are flowing, who's
making the money and if there is gouging, price gouging that's against the rules
too. so start bring in transparency and then enforce the rules properly and
punish the transgressors. make it unprofitable to indulge in crocodile
trade and eat jobs!
For more infomation >> Lexus IS 300h Luxury Line | Mark Levinson - Duration: 0:55. 
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