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agreement. But the average person should
be skeptical of negotiations that would extend the model of the
North American Free Trade Agreement, a treaty that has brought
the US job losses, lower wages and a ballooning trade deficit,
to the entire hemisphere. In fact, it is likely that this treaty
will go beyond NAFTA. It will incorporate some of the most far-reaching
provisions of the WTO system, the proposed General Agreement
on Trade in Services (GATS), and the abandoned Multilateral Agreement
on Investment (MAI). These are all agreements that promote globalization
under terms extremely favorable to big business and largely heedless
of the needs of the masses of the populations in the countries
concerned.
This may be why the average person and
until recently most members of the US Congress have been kept
unaware of even the existence of negotiations. Negotiations have
been conducted largely in secret, with the negotiating documents
closed to all those without security clearance. Over 500 corporate
representatives on the Trade Advisory Committee have this clearance,
along with the trade negotiators, and have been able to heavily
influence the ongoing negotiations. Meanwhile, interested citizens
groups have been restricted to submitting their concerns to a
committee of government representatives who are supposed to transmit
them to the negotiators.
The structure of the negotiating committees
reinforced fears that public concerns were not being taken into
account. Negotiations have been proceeding in nine working groups:
1) agriculture; 2) services; 3) investment; 4) dispute settlement;
5) intellectual property rights; 6) subsidies, anti-dumping and
countervailing duties; 7) competition policy; 8) government procurement;
and 9) market access.
The descriptions of the mandates of
the committees makes it clear that their roles is to free up,
as much as possible, international movement of capital in all
areas. The demands of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for
working groups on democratic governance, labor and human rights,
consumer safety, and the environment were denied.
Finally, under pressure from citizens
groups and members of Congress, the governments of the US and
Canada have made summaries of their positions in the negotiations
public. The summaries have confirmed the worst fears of NGOs
about the provisions in the working groups drafts. As Maude Barlow,
Volunteer Chairperson of The Council of Canadians, puts it: "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 openly ambitious hemispheric
pact." And, as under NAFTA, while the interests of big business
would be backed by enforceable sanctions, the interests of the
public in a clean environment and fair labor standards are acknowledged
only in broad terms and are not backed by any enforcement mechanism.
Some of the things that could happen
under the FTAA:
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