Apr/May 2001
Energy
Crisis or greed crisis?
Jackie alan Giuliano, Ph.D.
US
Science And Technology Policy
A New Century, A New Framework
Jill Chopyak
An
Ounce Of Precaution: The "Precautionary Principle" Versus "Risk
Management"
Donella
Meadows
The
Pain of the World Passes Through Us
Gaea Yudron, MRET
Plastic
Softeners in Food & Water Linked to Reproductive Disorders
Rachel’s Bi-weekly
Political money: Like A Big Water Balloon by John Darling
Congress:
The Real Pros At Quid Pro Quo
Arianna Huffington
Citizen
Protests Continue: Worldwide Opposition
Kayla M. Starr
Fiddling
While Rome Burns
Blair Bobier
These
Mountains & Rivers as Home:
The Work of the Siskiyou Field Institute
Let
the Children Move
Jon Bredal, MA
Breastfeeding:
A Simple Choice
Pamela Jorrick
Monthly Prayer by Peter Moore
The
Future of Energy Medicine
Richard Gordon
Shock:
How It Limits Our Lives, What We Can Do About It
Peggy Rubin
Cosmic Calendar by Salina Rain
Citizen
Protests Continue: Worldwide Opposition
Kayla M. Starr
In mid-April, corporate heads and government delegates from 34 countries of the America’s will converge on Quebec City in Canada for the Summit of the Americas. There they hope to cement their latest strategy for multi-national corporations to choose the direction of the world economy. The Free Trade Area for the Americas (FTAA), which is essentially an expansion of the existing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), includes many new countries in the pact and extends free trade's reach into new sectors. It is intended by its architects to be the most far-reaching trade agreement in history. Although it is based on the model of NAFTA, the FTAA goes far beyond NAFTA in its scope and power.
The FTAA, as it now stands, would introduce into the Western Hemisphere all the disciplines of the proposed services agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), and the powers of the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), to create a new trade powerhouse with sweeping new authority over every aspect of life in Canada and the Americas.
It would give corporations unprecedented rights to pursue their trade interests through legally binding trade tribunals. Combining these provisions into one agreement would give unequaled new rights to the transnational corporations of the hemisphere to compete for and even challenge every publicly funded service of its governments— including health care, education, social security, culture and environmental protection— and would grant huge new powers to service corporations. For instance, all public services at all levels of government would have to be opened up for competition from foreign for-profit service corporations. This agreement would disallow any local government from preferential funding to domestic service providers in services as diverse as health care, child care, education, municipal services, libraries, culture, and sewer and water services.
A look at NAFTA's legacy shows why these kind of "free trade" agreements should be opposed:
- Working families suffer. In the US, almost 400,000 jobs have been lost since NAFTA, with workers' new jobs paying, on average, only 77 percent of the wages of their earlier employment; in Mexico since NAFTA one million more Mexicans earn less than the minimum wage, and eight million families have slipped from the middle class into poverty.
- The environment suffers. In the maquiladora zones along the US-Mexico border, the increased pollution and improper disposal of chemical wastes has dramatically increased rates of hepatitis and birth defects.
NAFTA should be repealed, not expanded.
The proposed FTAA provisions on competition policy, government procurement, market access and dispute settlement, together with the inclusion of services and investment, could shackle all local municipalities’ ability to create or maintain laws, standards and regulations to protect the health, safety and well-being of their citizens and the environment they share.
Moreover, the FTAA negotiators appear to have chosen to emulate the WTO rather than NAFTA in key areas of standard-setting and dispute settlement, where the WTO rules are tougher. They even intend to lock in the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) introduced earlier into Latin America by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Under these programs, most developing countries are forced to:
- Abandon domestic industry in favor of transnational corporate interests.
- Turn their best agricultural lands over to export crops to pay off their national debt.
- Curtail public spending on social programs and abandon universal health care, education and social security programs.
- Deregulate their electricity, transportation, energy and natural resources sectors.
- Remove regulatory
impediments to foreign investment.
Essentially, what the FTAA negotiators have done, urged on by the big business community in every country, is to take the most ambitious elements of every global trade and investment agreement—existing or proposed—and put them all together in this despotic hemispheric pact. From the beginning, the big corporations and their lobby groups have been an integral part of the process. In the U.S., a variety of corporate committees advise the American negotiators and, under the Trade Advisory Committee system, over 500 corporate representatives have security clearance and access to FTAA negotiating documents.
As in former trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO, this free trade agreement would contain no safeguards to protect workers, human rights, social security or health and environmental standards. Once again civil society and the majority of citizens who want a different kind of trade agreement have been excluded from the negotiations and will be shut out of the deliberations in Quebec City.
One element in the proposed pact, backed by the "Miami Group" (the U.S., Canada, Argentina and Chile), is the desire to force all countries of the Americas to accept biotechnology and genetically modified foods (GMOs). This would successfully promote the interests of biotech companies such as Cargill, Monsanto, Aventis and Archer Daniels Midland over the survival needs of small farmers, peasants and communities throughout Latin America.
Public Citizen reports that the U.S. is trying to expand NAFTA's corporate protectionism rules on patents to the hemisphere, rules that give a company with a patent in one country the monopoly marketing rights to the item throughout the region, thereby robbing local people of access to traditional medicines. Negotiated behind closed doors, and imposed unilaterally, the FTAA process is another example of the kind of economic control that aims to suppress the gains of popular struggles of the past and reinforce the power of cash and laws over our lives.
Continue article on next page...
