Australia Eliminates Trade Tariffs for Poorest Nations
"I am pleased to announce today that Australia will grant tariff and quota free access for 49 least developed countries as well as East Timor," Howard said.
The Australian leader, speaking on the eve of a major Asia-Pacific summit at this Pacific beach resort in Mexico, lashed out at the protective agricultural barriers erected by the European Union, United States and Japan.
Industrialized nations spent more than $300 billion last year on agricultural subsidies -- six times the total government aid to developing countries, according to the International Monetary Fund.
"The levels of protection in agriculture maintained by the United States, by Japan and by the European Union have an extremely adverse effect on many developing countries," Howard said.
"Export earnings of the world's poorest countries are depressed by at least 10 percent because they are shut out of the world's biggest agricultural markets: the United States, the European Union and Japan," Howard said.
He called on leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit to keep their eyes on the reason for APEC's formation in 1989 -- the promotion of free trade.
"We must reassert by our practice as well as our rhetoric, that the original goals of APEC remain desirable," Howard said.
Critics say APEC's free-trade agenda has wasted away in past years, as summits are increasingly hijacked by the crisis of the day.
This year, APEC is overshadowed by the U.S. face off with Iraq, North Korea's admission that it has a nuclear weapons program, and the Moscow hostage crisis that has forced President Vladimir Putin to pull out.
Free trade offered greater benefits than more aid, Howard said.
"Those calls (for increased aid) would have more resonance and deliver more benefits and they would mean a lot more to developing countries if they were matched or even replaced by the breaking down of trade barriers," the Australian prime minister said.
"In the end that would do more to help the poor than development assistance," he said. "The key lessons of that last 50 years is that those countries that open their markets develop the most."
Australia is a member of the "Cairns Group" of 18 agricultural exporting countries, which is championing drastic cuts in domestic subsidies and support measures for farming.
Meanwhile, Malaysia's Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi on Friday marked his debut at the APEC summit by taking over the lonely anti-globalization battle long waged by his boss Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad.
Abdullah, who is expected to succeed Mahathir in October next year, took special aim at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) during his debut at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum.
"Globalization is not the universal and unmitigated good that it was once portrayed to be," charged Abdullah, who is also minister of home affairs, in a speech ahead of the APEC leaders summit which began on Saturday.
"A one-size-fits-all strategy of the kind dogmatically adopted by the IMF in particular should be avoided, for it has proven to be particularly damaging," said Abdullah.
"Malaysia does not believe in the prevailing orthodoxy of the Washington consensus and the IMF," the 62-year-old deputy premier said.
"We should not use ailing institutions to heal sick economies," he said.
"Malaysia advocates a policy of prosper the neighbor. Such an approach benefits all in the long run," he said. "Economic problems cannot be solved by economics alone, as the damage caused by IMF remedies has proven."
Mahathir has carved out a reputation as a leading critic of the global financial system under the umbrella of the IMF and World Bank, following a number of high-profile trades at international conference.
Globalization is leaving "too many countries and too many people behind," he said. Malaysia has also been "a victim of the excesses of globalization," Abdullah said, adding: "It has been exposed to cyclical volatility in the international markets."