Dear Editor:
During the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, Canada on April 21-22, over 50,000 people protested the plans to move ahead on the latest free trade agreement, the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Now President Bush is asking for Fast Track rights to continue negotiations. It is only the Congress that has the right to make trade agreements, but Fast Track is a way around this. It limits the time an agreement can be debated and prevents it from being changed–it must be voted up or down. Fast Track will soon be voted on in the House.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas is a type of “NAFTA” for 34 countries in North and South America. One of the scariest things about it is that, like NAFTA, this agreement makes it illegal for national, state and local governments to protect their citizens from corporate misconduct.
The FTAA negotiators indicate it will follow the NAFTA model and include “investor-state” provisions. This means that if any government now has or passes laws banning a product of a foreign corporation because it is a threat to health, safety, or the environment, then that corporation can sue to have the law struck down–and they can also sue for damages on the reasoning that they are being deprived of profits they expect to make in the future. For example, Methanex of Canada was barred by the state of California from marketing MTBE, a gasoline additive that is suspected of being able to cause cancer and neurological problems in humans. Methanex sued California for $970 million, saying the California ban amounted to a seizure of their property in terms of what they calculated that their future profits would be.
Canada has already lost a similar case to Ethyl Corp. of Virginia which sued Canada over a ban on the gasoline additive MMT. In 1997 Canada imposed a ban on the import whose primary ingredient, manganese, is a know human neurotoxin. Ethyl responded with a $250 million lawsuit, claiming the law was a seizure of its property because it would eliminate the profits Ethyl expected to earn through Canadian sales of the additive. The Canadian government agreed to pay Ethyl only $13 million in damages and then proclaimed publicly that MMT is “safe.” The rules for the FTAA, as for NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, dismantle the “Precautionary Principle,” where the burden of proof is on the manufacturer to show that their product is safe. Instead, these trade tribunals demand that harm must first be demonstrated beyond a scientific doubt–people must already be sick, dead, wildlife brought to extinction, water already contaminated, invasive species already rampant before a product can be banned.
If NAFTA and the WTO are any indication, the FTAA will increase deforestation, pollution and poverty in the US and throughout the hemisphere. The US has already had its Clean Air act gutted by a WTO ruling that Venezuela had the right to export dirty, polluting oil to the US–oil which we do not allow our domestic companies to produce. Since NAFTA it is estimated that over a million U.S. jobs have been lost as companies relocated to Mexico to take advantage of the weaker labor standards. Mexico, eight years into NAFTA, now has record-high poverty rates of 70 percent. Under NAFTA Mexico was forced to pay damages to a US company, Metalclad, that was refused the right to build a toxic waste dump directly over an underground water aquifer.
All of these examples are only a few among many.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement is an expanded version of the NAFTA corporate power-grab that threatens our health, safety, environment, the autonomy of our own government and democracy throughout the hemisphere. It is a form of extortion where taxpayers and civil society are being made to either accept products that poison us and destroy the environment or pay corporations not to market them. It needs to have a stake put through its heart. We need to hold our Congressional representatives accountable for voting down Fast Track and voting down this dangerous free trade agreement.
Judith Karpova
Hudson County Green Party