May 2001

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Ten-point Plan to Fight for the Americas

By signing the international statement below, your organization can join civil society groups throughout the hemisphere in rejecting the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement. For the full text of the statement, including an excellent 10-point list of specific governmental actions to be encouraged or discouraged, visit www.tradewatch.org.

To add your organization, send an email with "FTAA sign-on" in the subject line to alesha@citizen.org. In the body of the Email list the organization and country (contact information such as address, phone & fax is also appreciated) that you are signing on. Those who wish should also mention how many people the organization represents. You can find the text in Spanish, French, and Portuguese, at the above web site.

--Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, 215 Pennsylvania Ave SE, Washington DC 20003; 202-454-5103; www.tradewatch.org

Over the last decade, transnational corporations have used international commercial agreements to improve their profit margins at the expense of the public interest. The 1994 implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the 1995 establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) were both promoted as a means of creating global prosperity--a rising tide which would lift all boats by opening markets and encouraging the freer flow of goods and capital across borders. However, the record has shown that this corporate-managed trade model actually has encouraged a race to the bottom in labor, environmental, and public health and safety standards; increased pressure on the environment and natural resources; loss of living-wage and unionized jobs; attacks on food security; increased levels of poverty and economic inequality; wildfire spread of financial crises such as the Mexican peso crisis; privatization of services which denies many people access to essential social services such as health care, education, and water; and diminished democratic and accountable decision-making.

Quebec City, April 21. Photo © Jeff Manzelli, freemanz.com

Last month, 34 heads of state and trade ministers, from every nation of the Western Hemisphere except Cuba, discussed an expansion of this failed model of increased privatization and deregulation to the entire hemisphere via a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The proposed FTAA would combine the most problematic aspects of NAFTA, the WTO and the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), effectively handcuffing governments' public interest policy-making capacity and enhancing corporate control at the expense of citizens throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, by:

• providing new "investor protections" which empower corporations to sue governments in closed-door tribunals over domestic policies which may undermine their future expected profits, resulting in multi-million dollar cash compensations to be paid by taxpayers;
• limiting governments' abilities to regulate direct foreign investment, as well as speculative capital flows, in order to protect their economies from excessive volatility;
• setting up dispute resolution processes which refer disagreements to secret international trade tribunals above and outside of national judiciaries which allow foreign governments and corporations to bypass a nation's courts and legal system;
• providing corporations with new rights and tools to attack government standards for food security, public health and safety, and worker safeguards and to attack laws that ensure that corporations do not pollute the communities in which they operate; and
• expanding "trade" disciplines to cover the service sector, which could increase pressure on governments to privatize and/or deregulate essential public services that are already under fire.

FTAA negotiations have been conducted under the strictest terms of secrecy. Business groups acting as official advisors to the FTAA negotiators have seen the draft text and related documents, as have some government-selected labor and environmental groups in the United States. However, the public and journalists have not been allowed access to the text. Indeed, only one government of 34 has even made public its own recommended language for inclusion in the final agreement. Even parliamentarians have been denied access to crucial information or have been left unaware that negotiations were ongoing at all. Despite the lack of transparency and democratic process in the negotiations, the governments involved are moving towards completion of the FTAA no later than 2005. They also are considering some "early harvest" agreements, which means that certain chapters would go into effect much sooner--wreaking havoc throughout the hemisphere as parliaments are forced to change public interest laws and regulations to comply with corporate-led priorities. While civil society has attempted to voice its opinions and concerns to negotiators from various governments, there is no evidence to date that these concerns have been heard, much less considered, in the actual FTAA negotiations.

The undersigned groups will closely monitor their governments' participation in these negotiations to ascertain that FTAA negotiations modeled on a combination of NAFTA, MAI and WTO do not continue. Some specific indicators of the unacceptable corporate-managed trade system for which we will be watching are [see www.tradewatch.org].

These organizations are committed to fight against the corporate model of globalization expressed in the FTAA, and will instead advocate for new visions for the Americas and Caribbean based on principles of democratic and transparent decision-making, equitable and sustainable development, and protection of the public interest above corporate profit.

Previous Article    Next Article