I wrote this paper for a class. It\'s written for an audience that doesn\'t know a thing about free trade. By no means is it comprehensive (the original title was \"FTAA vs. Families: Barriers to Trade\" or something to that effect). But it gives the reader a general feeling for what the FTAA is, what it does, and talks about free trade in general. It\'s very easy to read and has no citations, but everything in there is as accurate as any paper on the FTAA can be. Has a VERY anti-free trade stance.
What is the FTAA?
The Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) sets up the Free Trade Area of the Americas (also known as the FTAA). Both are used interchangeably, and when I use the acronym FTAA, I will be referring to both. The FTAA has been billed as \"NAFTA Plus\" – it will expand both the North American Free Trade Area and the North American Free Trade Agreement. The area will be extended to include the entire western hemisphere, excluding Cuba. The agreement itself will be expanded to include different ideas and mandates that are not included in NAFTA, but have been included in other free trade agreements since NAFTA, along with some brand new mandates. Free trade is a principle of capitalism and liberalism. \"Free trade\" in this sense means that governments should take a laissez-faire approach to trade and allow the market to regulate itself. This is not, however, the \"free trade\" that is laid out in the FTAA. This \"free trade\" requires governments to defend the \"rights\" of multinational corporations in the interest of trade, even if it means trampling the rights of real people – rights such as the right to eat, the right to have shelter, the right to unionize, the right to a living wage, etc. The actual text of the FTAA has not been released to the public yet. It was first released to 500 CEO’s of major multinational corporations. It was then released at the last minute to lawmakers prior to the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City (where the FTAA was to be discussed) in April. This demonstrates the government’s priorities when it comes to free trade. What has been released is a summary of the FTAA, written by the same people that are writing the agreement. We have no way of knowing that these summaries are accurate because they will not release the text. Also, when it comes to challenging the FTAA or using the FTAA to challenge other countries in court, the summaries will not be admissible – all court decisions will be made according to what is actually written. This report is based on the summaries that have been released by the Organization of American States (OAS), which is the organization that all of the FTAA countries are a part of. It is also based on how NAFTA and other similar free trade agreements have already affected the U.S. and other involved countries. Because, as stated before, the FTAA is \"NAFTA on steroids,\" we can assume that FTAA will have the same affects as NAFTA and other agreements, except on a larger scale.
Who is affected by the FTAA?
Every country that is a part of the FTAA is affected – and even those that don’t want to be a part of it. Venezuela has refused to sign any agreements relating to the FTAA so far, but it is unclear how this will affect their inclusion in the Free Trade Area. I will divide the discussion of the FTAA’s affect on children into three different categories: children from the U.S., Canadian children, and Latin American children. All are affected, but in very different ways.
How does FTAA work?
As stated before, the FTAA combines many previous free trade agreements into one large agreement. It also combines the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) rules and streamlines the process by which grievances are acknowledged and, if necessary, remedied and/or redressed. As it stands now, if a corporation feels that its \"rights\" to free trade are being interfered with by another government or people in another country, the corporation must convince its own government to bring the other country to the WTO for a review. The WTO will review the case and make a decision. These decisions are based on the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS), which all countries that belong to the WTO agree to. In a nutshell, GATS prohibits anything that is a \"barrier to trade.\" Barriers to trade include social welfare programs such as national healthcare and public schools, and they also include environmental protections, labor standards, labor unions, national control of natural resources, etc. GATS will be a part of the FTAA, but, as stated before, the process will be streamlined. As American pharmaceutical companies have learned, it can sometimes be difficult to convince governments to file grievances against other governments, especially on unpopular issues that involve human rights. Also, if one government does file a grievance against another, the WTO review is a long process. However, the GATS portion of the FTAA will allow individual corporations to bring suits against other countries, and the cases will be decided by a trade tribunal. The tribunal will consist of trade lawyers who are employed by multinational corporations. The countries that have suits against them will not be allowed to defend their actions or the actions of their citizens. If we were to make the analogy between this situation and being charged with a crime, imagine that you were charged with a crime, the prosecutor is also the judge, and you are not allowed to defend yourself at all – you’re not even allowed in the courtroom. The FTAA also includes stipulations about intellectual property rights, or \"patents.\" The main focus of criticisms of these patent laws are the ones concerning seeds and pharmaceuticals.
What’s good for corporations is good for America, right?
Not quite. This statement is based on the \"trickle-down economy theory:\" allow corporations to get very rich, and the benefits will \"trickle down\" to the rest of us. Well, liberals and leftists have a rather crude saying that goes, \"With trickle-down economics, we all get pissed on.\" Capitalism requires that the economy be expanding constantly, at a greater and greater rate. Because of this, the trickle-down economics can’t work: if you allow corporations to make more money, they won’t give their workers a \"bigger slice of the pie.\" Instead, they will take measures to make even more money. As we have seen in the past, this means that corporations with record-high profits will use those profits to move their factories and plants overseas to where the labor is cheaper, the environmental standards are lax or non-existent, and the governments are more repressive. Obviously, this will affect American children in a major way, because it will affect their parents. With NAFTA, we waved good-bye to 766,000 jobs at last count. These were mostly manufacturing jobs that moved to Mexico. NAFTA promised to create 200,000 jobs per year, but only about 1,500 white-collar jobs were created within the first few years, and after that the government stopped counting. So what does this mean for those 766,000 workers who lost their jobs? Well, because they had manufacturing jobs (which are scarce in the U.S. now), most were probably unable to find new jobs that paid as much money as their former union jobs. New jobs are being created in the U.S., but they are being created in the service sector. This means that former industrial workers are now flipping burgers at McDonalds in part-time, non-union jobs. Because service jobs pay below the poverty line more often than not, workers are unable to support their families. As a result of jobs being moved out of the U.S. and into Mexico, many families cannot afford to feed their children. Furthermore, service sector jobs almost never offer affordable health insurance, which is vital for health babies and children. High infant mortality rates amongst black babies are a direct result of little or no prenatal care. This lack of healthcare can be attributed to the fact that black men’s main source of unemployment was manufacturing jobs, until they moved overseas. NAFTA has also affected those few industrial workers that haven’t lost their jobs. The fear of losing more jobs overseas, combined with corrupt union bosses, has scared workers into demanding less from their employers. As a result, it is becoming more and more difficult to support a family on an industrial worker’s wages. They are losing real wages and benefits. Because NAFTA only involved one source of cheap labor (Mexico) and FTAA offers 31 (all Latin American countries), we can safely assume that the FTAA will be even more devastating to families and workers than NAFTA ever was. Perhaps the most frightening part about FTAA is the GATS section of it. GATS won’t affect us in any direct way that we can immediately see. It will require that all public services be made conducive to free trade and private business. Private business encroaches upon just about every aspect of American’s lives – from education to healthcare to the water we drink. Small changes will be noticeable – schools may find it difficult to keep corporations such as Taco Bell out of their cafeterias and Nike out of their students’ pants. But the most devastating effect that GATS will have on American children is that it will make it impossible for as to win what many of us having been fighting so hard for: universal healthcare. The United States is the only industrialized country that doesn’t guarantee healthcare for every single child. We’ve come so close to winning it, and if the FTAA passes, we can kiss our dreams good bye. National healthcare programs are in direct violation of GATS, because they are \"barriers to trade.\" National healthcare programs prevent private health care providers from sucking the most money possible out of citizens, at the expense of those who can’t afford it. That is a violation of GATS.
What about Canadian children?
Canadian workers face the same problems American workers do: FTAA will cause more jobs to move overseas, and will not create new jobs that will effectively replace them. I was in Canada about a month ago, and judging from the media, most Canadians are very opposed to the FTAA. GATS is what has them most frightened, because it threatens their universal healthcare. Despite neo-liberals’ claims that GATS will not affect Canada’s healthcare system, Canadians know it will. Pro-FTAA politicians assure Canadians that Canada is too powerful to have its national healthcare threatened by U.S. healthcare corporations. However, Canadians still remember how the U.S. forced them to accept fuel that Canada had outlawed because it exceeded environmental standards. Their environmental standards were ruled \"barriers to trade\" under NAFTA. Because of many cases like this one, Canadians are wary of the FTAA, which promises to make NAFTA bigger and more powerful. If Canada lost its national healthcare, the consequences would be devastating. Canada enjoys a low infant mortality rate, which is a generally accepted sign of an overall healthy population. This can be attributed to the fact that Canada guarantees that all its citizens health care when they need it. Because the Canadian government foots the bill (instead of its citizens), the government has programs that encourage preventative healthcare – it attempts to keep its citizens healthy so that it won’t have to pay when they get sick. If healthcare in Canada is privatized, preventative healthcare will be a thing of the past, because it is much more profitable to treat a disease rather than prevent it. Because of this, it is safe to say that the FTAA will lead to an overall decline in health in Canada, especially in children who are in their formative years.
Isn’t the FTAA good for Latin America?
Wrong again. As has been proven with NAFTA in Mexico, Latin American governments don’t have the resources (or the ability, thanks to the way trade disputes are handled) to fight suits against them at the trade tribunal. Labor unions are under constant attack in Mexico as a result of NAFTA. Child labor laws and higher minimum wage requirements are barriers to trade, and, as a result, real wages have decreased 27% in Mexico since the passing of NAFTA. Many people argue that while the jobs don’t pay well, at least they pay something. However, sweatshop workers do not get paid a living wage. This means they cannot afford the things they need to survive on what they are making. They might as well not be working at all. Working conditions have also suffered. There’s a reason corporations like to move factories to developing countries, and it’s because safe working conditions are not a necessity, in fact, again, they are considered barriers to trade. Environmental pollution is another huge NAFTA-related problem in developing countries like Mexico. This is a result of labor laws being shot down under the WTO, International Monetary Fund/World Bank mandates, and various free trade agreements. FTAA will make it much easier to remove trade barriers such as environmental protection laws. As a result of corporate pollution, drinking water in many areas of Mexico is unsafe, and women are encouraged to refrain from breast-feeding their babies because of toxins in their breast milk. FTAA will expand this environmental devastation to the rest of Latin America. Access to affordable medication is a big issue in the FTAA. As stated above, the FTAA includes patent laws that prevent other companies from producing generic drugs. Protest groups have focused on the AIDS issue, because many countries are facing currently facing AIDS pandemics. Brazil, faced with a quarter of its population being HIV positive, has passed laws that allow it to produce its own generic AIDS drugs. If FTAA is implemented, it is likely that Brazil will be one of the first countries attacked for violating these patent laws. Because the actual FTAA documents have no been released, we do not know the wording of these patent laws. There was a similar free trade agreement passed over a year ago with Africa called the African Growth and Opportunity Act (a misnomer). It contained language that prohibited the producing of generic medicines. Thanks to international pressure, an executive order issued at the last minute allowed African countries to produce their own AIDS drugs if they faced a \"medical crisis.\" Because many African countries were facing AIDS rates that were as higher than 1 in 5 people being affected with HIV or AIDS, and because there is a 1 in 2 chance that a 15 year old boy in South Africa will die from AIDS, some African countries felt that this was a \"medical emergency\" and began producing their own generic AIDS drugs. American pharmaceutical companies felt that this was in fact not a medical emergency, and therefore filed a suit against Africa under the African Growth and Opportunity Act. We can expect the same to happen to Brazil and other countries that have followed suit if the FTAA goes into affect.
So what can we do to stop the FTAA?
In order for the FTAA to go into effect, the U.S. congress must approve it. President Bush is currently attempting to \"fast track\" the FTAA, which would force congress to vote \"yes\" or \"no\" on FTAA, without allowing them to make any changes to it. Many congresspersons have already said that they will vote \"no\" on FTAA unless they are given the power to make changes to it that they feel are necessary. It is important that we call our representatives and encourage them to vote \"no\" on fast-tracking the FTAA, if, at the very least, to buy time to stop the FTAA completely. The FTAA cannot be reformed into a warmer, fuzzier free trade agreement that will respect human rights and the environment. The FTAA, like all free trade agreements and organizations, is designed to take only trade into consideration. It cannot take environmental protections or human rights into consideration. It is not designed to do that and it cannot do that. Attempting to reform the FTAA to respect human rights is analogous to attempting to reform a slaughterhouse to make it vegetarian. It is not designed to work that way and it cannot work that way. The FTAA must be stopped. But how? Threatening politicians with our votes won’t work: we have a choice between Republicans who promise us the FTAA and Democrats who gave us NAFTA. Politicians won’t act because they realize that they have our votes monopolized. We must prevent the FTAA from being signed. The Organization of American States will continue to hold meetings to discuss agreements. They must be shut down. If the FTAA is signed, we must prevent it from going into effect. We must refuse to comply. This means that we must refuse to allow factories to be shut down. We must support unions, both in the U.S. and abroad that are truly working to protect workers and their jobs. We must refuse to buy products that were made in sweatshops that are protected under the FTAA. We must instead look to support products that are made by unions in the U.S., or products that are made/grown by co-operatives in Latin America. If cases are brought before the trade tribunal, we must prevent them from being decided in corporations’ favor, as we did with the South Africa drug access suit. We must resist the FTAA, because it will destroy our future.
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