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Miami Vice: The FTAA returns to Florida
by Aziz Choudry, CacZLEA (Montreal)
November 11th, 2003
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In December 1994, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was
launched at the first Summit of the Americas in Miami, sponsored by the
Organization of American States (OAS).
Miami will host the FTAA Eighth Ministerial and other associated
meetings from 16-21 November, while Florida Governor Jeb Bush lobbies
for the city to become the home of a proposed permanent FTAA
secretariat. Activists from across the Americas are converging on Miami
to confront the FTAA or organizing anti-FTAA actions in their own
communities.
Latin American activists sometimes dub the FTAA and the World Trade
Organization (WTO) as “the two headed monster” of neoliberalism. For
Indigenous Peoples, neoliberal globalization is the latest chapter in
over 500 years of colonialism, dispossession and genocide in the
Americas.
After September’s failed Cancun WTO ministerial, urged on by big
business, many governments are turning to regional, subregional and
bilateral trade and investment deals.
With a negotiating deadline of 2005, the FTAA is a proposed trade and
investment agreement which would include all of the countries in the
Americas, except Cuba. It has nine negotiating groups responsible for
drafting chapters on market access, agriculture, investment, services,
government procurement, dispute settlement, intellectual property
rights, subsidies, antidumping and countervailing duties and competition
policy. The US and Canadian governments want to extend and deepen the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA – between Canada, the USA and
Mexico) to another 31 countries, impacting the lives and environments
of 800 million people.
The FTAA promotes a package of reforms which include: minimal controls
on big business; unrestricted foreign investment; unlimited export of
profits; privatization of public assets, utilities and services; full
exposure of domestic markets to cheap imports; privately-funded and
owned infrastructure operating through deregulated markets.
An FTAA services agreement would mean market-driven service sectors,
including water, education, postal services, financial services, energy,
and healthcare. Its intellectual property agreement will accelerate the
commodification and privatization of life itself and protect the
monopoly rights of pharmaceutical and agrochemical corporations over the
rights of people to have access to affordable lifesaving drugs or the
ability to grow crops from their own seeds. The FTAA will lock in an
exploitative employment regime across all 34 countries – a competitive,
low-cost, deunionized and flexible (temporary, part-time and
contract-based) workforce. Proposed negotiating drafts detail even more
radical commitments to free trade and investment than the WTO.
Whether under IMF/World Bank/-imposed structural adjustment programs or
domestic free market policies imposed in the USA and Canada, the FTAA
and other trade and investment agreements serve to lock this regime in
making it very hard for future governments to choose alternatives to
free market capitalism.
While FTAA talks take place in secret, behind massive security, the
American Business Forum (ABF) formed in 1996 by over 1000 of the
hemisphere’s business leaders, has privileged access to the
negotiations. In Miami the ABF will hold its eighth meeting from
17-19th November, and make recommendations to the FTAA trade ministerial
meeting. The FTAA serves the interests of corporate capital, not
communities.
Throughout the hemisphere, neoliberalism goes hand in hand with
militarization. From Mexico, to Plan Colombia, to Bolivia, local
military forces and militias, with US military backing, sow terror so
that transnational corporations and local elites reap profits and
political power. But resistance is rising.
When Quebec City hosted the Summit of the Americas in April 2001, tens
of thousands demonstrated against the FTAA. In September 2002 around 10
million Brazilians voted against the FTAA in an unofficial referendum
organized by 60 organizations. In November 2002 in Quito, Ecuador,
thousands marched against the 7th FTAA Ministerial meeting. Huge marches
in El Salvador protested plans to privatize healthcare and social
security in a country where telephone costs have more than doubled and
power rates increased fivefold since privatization. Throughout Central
America, opposition has been growing against the FTAA’s younger brother,
the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which the US wants
to conclude in December. This October, a popular uprising in Bolivia
protesting US-backed President Sanchez de Lozada’s free market policies
was met with brutal state repression and many deaths but forced his
resignation.
Divisions within the WTO are mirrored at the FTAA table and are
threatening progress US proposals (backed by Canada) for a broad-ranging
agreement are being countered by Brazil (which co-chairs FTAA talks
with the US) which wants negotiations scaled back to focus on trade in
agricultural and manufactured goods. Venezuela’s government is also
highly critical of restrictions which the FTAA would put on governments’
ability to use a range of policy options, of the unrealistic
negotiating deadlines, and of the anti-democratic nature of the talks.
Chapter 11, NAFTA’s investment chapter, the basis for an FTAA investment
agreement, already enables corporations to sue Mexican, US and Canadian
governments, overturning health and safety, environmental and other
public interest laws in a secretive investor-state dispute process. In
1997 Ethyl Corporation, a US company, used Chapter 11 to sue Ottawa
after it banned imports of its fuel additive MMT because it was a health
hazard. Facing a claim of US $250 million, Ottawa backed down, removed
the ban and paid Ethyl Corp US $13 million.
Since NAFTA’s passage ten years ago, cheap, subsidized US corn has
flooded the Mexican market, sold at prices below the cost of production,
with which campesinos cannot compete. This has led to massive
displacement, poverty and hunger, pushing people into the cities and
maquiladoras (export-processing zones) and forcing many to risk their
lives crossing the increasingly militarized border into the US in search
of work. All three NAFTA countries have experienced a widening gap
between rich and poor, massive job losses, and cuts to social spending.
From Canada to Argentina, people are resisting the imposition of the
FTAA. Negotiations are already starting to wobble. Let’s push the FTAA
over at Miami.
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