Leading Article: Short-changed

EVER SINCE Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations more than 200 years ago, free traders have presented themselves as champions of the poor. Last week the Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short, joined their ranks. In a withering attack on critics of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), she insisted that the new round of trade talks, to be held in Seattle next month, would bring major benefits for the world's poor. She went on to dismiss aid agencies not persuaded by her arguments as well-meaning, but misguided, closet protectionists.

She protests too much. One of the agencies in the firing line, Oxfam, tomorrow launches a devastating report on the trade practices of rich nations. It shows that governments like ours have systematically reneged on past commitments to open their markets to poor countries. Our trade barriers today cost the world's poor some $700bn a year - 14 times what they receive in aid. This is a scandal on a par with the debt crisis, and an even bigger cause of global poverty and inequality.

The double standards applied by governments now parading their free market credentials on the WTO catwalk defy belief. America imposes quotas on steel imports from Latin America - yet at the same time demands that poor countries open their markets to agricultural exports produced in the US with heavy subsidies. Likewise the EU spends taxpayers' money on aid for rural development in Africa - and then destroys livelihoods on a huge scale in the very same areas by dumping produce from Europe's food mountains on Africa's local markets. Joined-up thinking this is not. When it comes to removing trade barriers at home, the rich world has developed feet- dragging into an art form. Five years ago we pledged to phase out the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) which places restrictions on textiles - the developing world's single biggest manufacturing export. But we have so far done nothing. Meanwhile millions of the poor suffer.

Trade can act as a catalyst for reducing poverty, but only if the rules are not rigged against the poor. What is needed is an immediate end to all import restrictions on the world's 48 poorest countries, an end to agricultural export subsidies, and the rapid withdrawal of MFA restrictions. If the British Government wants to champion the interests of the poor, it should start by directing its fire at the trade practices of the industrialised world, rather than at the aid agencies, which are the poor's natural allies.