Campaign blog

The ActionAid Public Affairs team is continuing its tour of the three main parties' conferences and is this week in Manchester for the Labour Party's Annual Conference. Last week we were in Brighton for the Liberal Democrats and next week we will be in Birmingham for the Conservative Party Conference.

The Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, Ivan Lewis, yesterday delivered his speech to the Labour Party Conference to outline his and his party's vision for the UK's development policy.

As with the other two main parties we are spending some time with the Opposition to make sure that our campaigns and work in communities across the world is recognised by policy makers. Now is a crucial time for all political parties as they draw up their plans on development as the world looks beyond 2015 to agree a new set of governing principles that will decide how the richer countries direct their help towards the world's poorest.

At the Labour Party Conference, which this year is in Manchester, each Shadow Cabinet member delivers a speech on his or her brief which broadly outlines their approach to the issue and what they would do if there were to be a Labour Government at the next General Election.

It was fantastic for us to see the Shadow Development Secretary place the need to tackle tax havens at the heart of his speech, and that he drew inspiration from some of the work that ActionAid is doing in Malawi on support for children and early years' development.

We were especially pleased to see the strong reference to tax havens. For the past year we have consistently argued that there is a fundamental link between tax and development. In advancing the latter, one cannot ignore the former. The House of Commons' own International Development Committee itself recommended that the Government do more to address this link.

Ivan Lewis made clear that the main focus of any future Labour Government would be on early years development - in effect aping the Sure Start approach created by Labour when in power. He stated that it would be the aim of a Labour Government to frame the next set if worldwide development goals around early years development and the rights and opportunities of the child.

Leading this process would be Dame Tessa Jowell MP (former Culture Secretary) alongside Sarah Brown, wife of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. At ActionAid we firmly believe in the need to ensure that children, women and the wider community are empowered to find their own pathways out of poverty and where barriers to accessing food, education and fundamental rights are removed.

There were many other aspects of the speech that reflect the approach that ActionAid would advocate. There was a strong reference to the role of women in peacebuilding, which builds on a recent report of ours and we support his call for the Government to retain its commitment to spending 0.7% of GNI on aid (which, as Ivan Lewis made clear, would remove aid spending from short-term political considerations and tie our spending to the overall prosperity of the economy). He also reiterated the need to focus in ending countries' dependency on aid - more of our work on which can be found here.

That the Labour Party has now accepted the need to do more on this, and the fact that it has set its development policy with the need to tackle tax havens in mind is a fantastic endorsement of the hard work and passion of our campaigners, supporters and activists.

There’s only a week and a half to go until we celebrate 40 years of fighting poverty at ActionAid’s supporter conference on the 6th October.

Spaces are booking up fast so if you want one sign up today.

The event is going to be jam packed with speakers from around the world including Asgar Ali Sabri, the Director of Programmes, Policy and Campaigns in ActionAid Bangladesh, and David Barisa, who campaigned to stop 500,000 hectares of land being taken to grow biofuels in Kenya, and won.

New speakers we can announce include Ruchi Tripanthi, ActionAid’s resident food policy expert, to tell us all about the causes and consequences of global hunger and how we can tackle the root causes to make hunger crises a thing of the past. We’re also delighted that Jane Esuantsiwa Goldsmith will now be joining us, a women’s rights activist with over 20 years’ experience in campaigning and development.

With updates on our Tax Justice, Who Pays and Biofuels campaigns as well as a unique opportunity to find out about how we work around the world, and meet other ActionAid supporters. We will also have a digital doctor on hand to answer all your e-campaigning questions. If you ever wanted to know anything about ActionAid, and get some big development questions answered this is the event to come to.

There are still a few spaces left so click here to book yours.

Look forward to seeing you there!

It’s been a long old slog, but after six years’ campaigning we’re very close to winning a supermarket watchdog. Take action here to make sure it has teeth!

Long before the campaign started, we knew that the supermarkets’ trading practices were damaging for farmers and farm workers in developing countries.

But beyond asking supermarkets to change their ways voluntarily, the government wasn’t doing anything about it. This was a dark time for farming communities, as the voluntary approach had obviously failed.

Then, in 2006, we spotted an opportunity to campaign for legally enforced rules. The Competition Commission announced a major investigation into supermarkets’ dominance of the food industry, so we jumped on the case.

The inquiry aimed to find out whether shoppers were being ripped off by the giant superstores. But we knew it might also to expose the bullying practices that farmers had long been complaining about – and that there was an outside chance the Commission might set up a watchdog to stop the rot.

So ActionAid teamed up with the National Farmers Union, Friends of the Earth, the British Brands Group and Traidcraft to develop a blueprint for a supermarket 'adjudicator', and campaigned together to make it happen.

When the inquiry wrapped up in 2008, we could barely believe our eyes. Even though the idea of introducing new regulation was deeply unfashionable, the Competition Commission agreed with us that a watchdog was needed. Not only that, but they had adopted our adjudicator blueprint pretty much word for word.

This was in large part thanks to the 42,000 people who took action in support of the watchdog, which turned its fortunes round from dogs’ home cast-off to best-in-show at Crufts.

Our initial jubilation was dashed, however, when the Competition Commission realised it didn’t have the legal powers to set up the watchdog. Their lawyers said this had to be a job for government.

This was a grim moment as we knew it would add many more years to the policy process, and there was every chance that the government might reject the watchdog and let supermarkets off the hook.

But persistent lobbying with our campaign allies kept the pressure on, and in May this year the Queen announced a ‘Groceries Code Adjudicator’ Bill, which entered parliament a few days later.

We’ve done amazingly well as the Bill contains strong provisions that will benefit farmers and workers, over here and overseas. But for some unfathomable reason, the government doesn’t want the adjudicator to have the power to fine supermarkets that break the rules.

That’s why we’re having one last push to ensure the watchdog’s bite is worse than its bark, so click here if you’d like to bring about a fairer deal for farmers and farm workers.

The biofuels world is all abuzz with the news that the European Commission is near to agreeing a quite radical shift in its thinking on biofuels. In a draft proposal leaked by Reuters news agency, the Commission now acknowledges the impacts of biofuels on the environment and on people. This follows concerns raised by ActionAid and others, about the greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels. It also reflects the huge amount of bad press that biofuels have been getting as the spoils of the USA’s drought-stricken corn crop are used for ethanol. 

But is the Commission just trying to make itself look better, without actually wanting to change anything in practice? Let’s have a look at the detail.

The proposal would mean all emissions from biofuels – including those from indirect impacts - are looked at when calculating the carbon footprint of biofuels. But it will only do so under the Fuel Quality Directive (FQD) and not under the renewable energy Directive (RED).

Under the fuel quality Directive petrol companies have to reduce the carbon footprint of their operations by 6% by 2020. Biodiesel (as opposed to ethanol) would – if the proposal were adopted - no longer be useful as a means of meeting the 6% target, because when indirect impacts are considered, their greenhouse gas emissions are pretty much the same as from using fossil fuels, if not worse. The indirect impacts of non-food energy crops like miscanthus or jatropha wouldn’t be counted, however, though they clearly exist.

But the real problem is that indirect emissions are not being factored into the RED which is driving biofuels production. Biodiesel would still count as a renewable energy under the RED, even though it doesn’t save carbon under the FQD!

Clearly, this proposal would be nowhere near to making sure only biofuels that are good for climate change would be used in the EU.

- On stopping the use of precious food and land for biofuels

At present, official plans suggest that most (90%) of the RED 10% target would be delivered through biofuels, and most of that using food based biofuels. The draft proposal would cap at 5% the contribution that food-based biofuels could make to reaching the 10% target. The UK and other countries would be able to produce more than that, but the extra amount wouldn’t be counted towards the 10% target.

The cap sends a clear signal that turning food into fuel is not acceptable, but let’s be clear: it would represent an increase in the amount of food currently used for biofuels in the EU (4.5% of surface transport energy in 2011). And 5% would mean that every year, the EU would burn enough food to feed 190 million people (if not more). This is more than the populations of the UK, France and Italy combined. So again, the Commission’s draft does better on rhetoric but falls short on action.

Overall it’s clear that while the Commission’s proposal is a nice start, it really must try a lot harder if it wants to make sure EU biofuels mandates no longer drive hunger and climate change!

If you agree, then join ActionAid and others in pressing for an end to biofuel mandates.