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Make Your Voice Heard!
Educate these officials about the
Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)
- YOUR U.S. SENATOR U.S. Senate Washington D.C. 20510 Switchboard:
(202) 224-3121 www.senate.gov
- YOUR U.S. REPRESENTATIVE U.S. House of Representatives
Washington D.C. 20515 Switchboard: (202) 224-3121 www.house.gov
- President George Bush The White House 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Email: president@whitehouse.gov
(202) 456-6213 fax: (202) 456-2461
- U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick 600 17th Street,
NW Washington, D.C. 20508 Email: contactustr@ustr.gov
(888) 473-USTR or (202) 395-6135
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| Photo - Langelle-ACERCA |
Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA): Just Say Know
BACKGROUND
From April 20-22, 2001 trade negotiators held closed-door
meetings in Quebec City, Canada to further plans for the expansion
of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) with the
Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). This massive NAFTA
expansion is currently being negotiated in secret by trade
ministers from a total of 34 nations in North, Central and
South America and the Caribbean. The FTAA would affect 755
million people that live in the Western Hemisphere.
What is "FTAA" or "NAFTA for the Americas"?
The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is the formal name
given to an expansion of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade
Agreement) that would include all of the countries in the
western hemisphere except Cuba. This massive 34-country NAFTA
expansion is being negotiated right now in secret by trade
ministers from North, Central and South America and the Caribbean.
The goal of the FTAA is to impose the NAFTA model of new corporate
investment and patent protections, trade liberalization, deregulation,
and privatization hemisphere-wide. The FTAA draft texts are
secret, but information that has leaked out reveals that many
of the FTAA's chapters are literally extensions of NAFTA rules.
These rules would significantly increase the power corporations
would have to constrain governments from setting standards
for public health and safety, to safeguard their workers,
and to ensure that corporations do not pollute the communities
in which they operate. Effectively, these rules would handcuff
governments' public interest policymaking and enhance corporate
control at the expense of citizens throughout the Americas.
What can we learn about FTAA from NAFTA? FTAA
would deepen the negative effects of NAFTA that people in
Canada, Mexico and the U.S. have already suffered over the
past seven years and expand NAFTA's damage to the other 31
countries involved. The FTAA would intensify NAFTA's "race
to the bottom." For instance, under the FTAA, the wages of
already-exploited workers in Mexico could be leveraged against
even more desperate workers in Haiti, Guatemala or Brazil
by companies receiving new investor guarantees to produce
goods for export back into U.S. markets. A quick look at NAFTA's
legacy reveals disastrous consequences:
- It's estimated that over a million U.S. manufacturing
jobs have been lost since NAFTA as companies relocated to
Mexico to take advantage of $5 per day wages for Mexico's
manufacturing workers. Without enforceable labor rights,
Mexican workers cannot organize to increase their wages.
The laid-off U.S. workers usually find jobs with less security,
and wages that are about 77% of what they originally had.
- The trade surplus the U.S. enjoyed with Mexico before
NAFTA has become an $24.2 billion per year deficit as of
2000.
- Despite promises of increased economic development throughout
Mexico, only the border region has seen intensified industrial
activity. In border maquiladora factories, over one million
more Mexicans work for less than the minimum wage of $5
per day today than before NAFTA. Meanwhile, NAFTA's agricultural
terms have devastated small farmers, with one million peasant
farm families estimated to have been forced out of farming.
The displaced campesinos are forced either into emigrating
to the U.S. or into Mexico's overcrowded cities where unemployment
runs rampant. During the NAFTA period, eight million Mexicans
have fallen from the middle class into poverty.
- In addition, the increase of border industry has created
worsening environmental and public health threats in the
area. Along the border, the occurrence of some environmental
diseases, including hepatitis, is two or three times the
national average, due to lack of sewage treatment and safe
drinking water.
- Health, safety and environmental laws in the three NAFTA
countries have been attacked in NAFTA tribunals. Most recently,
the U.S. was ordered to permit access to all U.S. highways
for Mexican trucks. The panel cited devastating data describing
the severe safety problems still existing with many Mexican
trucks, which often do not comply with required driver and
truck safety standards, but nonetheless concluded that NAFTA's
rules require the U.S. to grant access unconditionally.
Although it's hard to imagine that anyone would push for
more of a failed model like this, what little we do know about
FTAA is that is likely to look quite a bit like NAFTA. In
fact, some FTAA texts are reported to be literally based on
NAFTA, with additional countries added in. We know what results
to expect!
Who is involved in the FTAA negotiations, and how did it
get started? High on their 1993 NAFTA victory in Congress,
U.S. officials organized a "Summit of the Americas" in Miami
in December 1994. There, trade ministers from 34 western hemisphere
countries agreed to a U.S. proposal to launch negotiations
to establish a hemispheric free trade area. After the so-called
Miami Summit, however, little was agreed on FTAA until the
"Santiago Summit" in Chile in April 1998. At this second summit,
the 34 nations set up a Trade Negotiations Committee (TNC),
consisting of vice ministers of trade from every country and
headed by Dr. Adalberto Rodriguez Giavarini of Argentina.
Negotiators also agreed that the FTAA would include rules
on agriculture, services, investment, dispute settlement,
intellectual property rights, subsides and anti-dumping, competition
policy, government procurement and market access. You would
never know it from news reports, but since late 1999, nine
formally-established working groups have met every few months
to lay out their countries' positions on these issues and
have begun writing the actual text of a new hemispheric free
trade agreement.
As with the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), many
Members of Congress have no idea that any of this is going
on. Congress never set goals for U.S. participation in these
talks. Congress has never delegated its Constitutional role
of setting the terms of international commerce to the Executive
branch. However, a variety of corporate committees have been
and continue to advise the U.S. negotiators. Under the U.S.
trade advisory committee system, over 500 corporate representatives
have security clearance and access to FTAA NAFTA expansion
documents. Organizations such as the Organization of American
States (OAS), Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the
UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean
(ECLAC), collectively known as the "Tripartite Committee,"
also provide direction.
Early on, non-governmental civil society organizations (NGOs)
demanded working groups on democratic governance, labor and
human rights, consumer safety and the environment. These demands
to include public interest negotiating topics on par with
those related to corporate interest were rejected. A "Committee
of Government Representatives on Civil Society" was established,
ostensibly to represent the views of civil society to the
TNC. Yet in reality, this so-called committee is little more
than a mail in-box. There is no mechanism to incorporate civil
society concerns and suggestions sent to the committee into
the negotiations, rendering the committee effectively useless
as a forum for these issues.
What could FTAA NAFTA expansion mean for you? Because negotiations
are occurring in secret and the texts have not been made public,
we must rely on our conversations with U.S. negotiators and
on FTAA documents leaked by other countries. Unless we act
now, the problems described below will be enshrined in a final
trade agreement and then it will be too late to change it!
New Corporate Power Tools to Attack Domestic Environmental,
Labor, Consumer and Other Public Interest Safeguards
U.S. trade officials confirm that FTAA will include the extreme
NAFTA provisions which empower corporations themselves to
sue governments in trade tribunals to demand removal of standards
or laws designed to protect public health and safety, or cash
compensation for compliance costs if the government decides
to keep standards in place. In other words, the FTAA would
provide a hemispheric "regulatory takings" clause enforceable
by corporations outside national court systems. These rules
are how NAFTA expansion provides a "back door" for the Multilateral
Agreement on Investment (MAI). We didn't call the MAI "NAFTA
on steroids" for nothing! The purpose of the MAI was to expand
worldwide NAFTA's investor protections and rights, which are
significantly more extreme than the terms of the WTO's investment
rules. Direct NAFTA expansion is just another way to force
a block of countries to accept these extreme new investor
privileges. U.S. trade officials say that FTAA will include
the most extreme, controversial aspects of both NAFTA and
the MAI.
NAFTA cases that set a likely precedent for FTAA actions
under this provision include: o The Canadian funeral home
chain Loewen Group used NAFTA investor protections to sue
the U.S. government for $750 million in cash damages after
a Mississippi court found Loewen guilty of malicious and fraudulent
practices that unfairly targeted a local small business. (NAFTA
permits companies to sue governments over rulings or regulations
that may potentially limit their profits.) Loewen argues that
the very existence of the state court system violates its
NAFTA rights and that U.S. tax dollars must be used to pay
the corporation back for the court's ordered damages.
The U.S.-based Ethyl Corporation used these provisions to
push Canada to pay $13 million in damages and drop its ban
on the dangerous gasoline additive MMT, a known toxin that
attacks the human nervous system. o U.S.-based Metalclad Corp.
sued a Mexican state to demand the right to open a toxic waste
disposal site, claiming that the environmental zoning law
forbidding the dump constituted an effective seizure of the
company's property - a seizure that, under the property rights
extended by NAFTA (and to be perpetuated in FTAA), requires
that the offending government compensate the company.
Food Safety, Hunger & GMOs
Instead of responding to growing U.S. consumer concerns about
genetically modified (GM) foods, the U.S. is trying to force
all countries to accept these products - an effort in which
unregulated U.S.-based corporations have taken a lead. Food
security organizations all over the world agree that the U.S.
seed and agribusiness corporations' demands to force countries
to accept these technologies will increase hunger in poor
nations. Being forced to buy expensive patented seeds every
season, rather than using locally developed seed which can
be saved for replanting will force traditional subsistence
farmers in the developing world into dependency on transnational
corporations and bring the hemisphere's many poor people closer
to starvation.
Meanwhile, FTAA will include NAFTA's stringent limits against
government policies promoting food safety. For instance, FTAA
is expected to list the pesticide standards of the Codex Alimentarius,
a corporate-influenced body, to set the permitted pesticide
rules. Domestic standards that provide more consumer protection
would be presumed to violate trade rules and would be subject
to challenge. Vital food safety policies regarding inspection
and labeling of meat, produce and more could also be constrained.
Even without this new assault, the World Health Organization
has reported that globalization of the food supply is increasing
the incidence and severity of food-borne illnesses.
If the U.S. position wins out, FTAA will promote the corporate
interests of biotech and agribusiness giants like Archer Daniels
Midland (ADM), Cargill and Monsanto over the public interest
in safe and secure food supplies worldwide.
Empowering Pharmaceutical Giants to Set Monopoly Prices
and Deny Access to Essential Medicines
The U.S. is trying to expand NAFTA's rules on patents to
the whole hemisphere. These NAFTA "intellectual property"
rules give a company with a patent in one country the monopoly
marketing rights on the item throughout the region. These
rules are a form of corporate protectionism that allow pharmaceutical
companies to forbid countries from granting compulsory licensing,
to allow competitor companies to manufacture a drug in exchange
for paying a fee to the patent-holder for "renting" the patent.
This monopoly control allows pharmaceutical corporations to
keep drug prices high and block production of generic versions
of life-saving drugs, which spells disaster for the ill and
impoverished, especially in developing nations. It is the
intellectual property rules that allow companies to lock down
patents on traditional medicines or seed varieties they collect
while on "biopiracy" missions in developing countries. The
rules grant "ownership" to whomever files a patent first on
such items based on traditional knowledge, effectively robbing
indigenous people of their cultural wealth.
Essential Social Services Endangered
The FTAA will contain a series of commitments to "liberalize"
services, which is much like the General Agreement on Trade
in Services (GATS) within the WTO. "Services" is a broad category
that includes education, health care, "environmental services"
(which can include access to water!), energy, postal services
and anything else we pay for that isn't a physical object.
Possible effects of the FTAA services agreement include:
- Removal of national licensing standards for medical, legal
and other key professionals, allowing doctors licensed in
one country to practice in any country, even if their level
of training or technological sophistication is different.
- Privatization of public schools and prisons in the U.S.,
opening the door to greater corporate control, corruption
and the temptation to cut critical corners (such as medical
care for inmates or upkeep of safe school facilities) in
the interests of improving profit margins.
- Privatization of postal services transferring U.S. Postal
Service functions to a few delivery companies like FedEx,
which could then send postal rates through the roof.
For more information, contact Public Citizen at (202) 546-4996
or www.citizen.org.
Additional Resources about the FTAA:
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