By IPS Correspondents
BOGOTA, Dec 18 2003 (IPS)

Critics of the impact of free trade agreements on Latin America, especially the projected effects of the FTAA, say the number of street vendors will increase in the region’s large cities.

Due to the inevitable flood of U.S. farm products, which have a competitive edge thanks to the huge government subsidies shelled out to U.S. farmers, ”the most likely scenario is an increase in street vendors” in the big cities of Latin America and the Caribbean, said Salvadoran economist César Villalona.

William Rodríguez, with Nicaragua’s International Studies Centre, also predicted an increase in rural and urban unemployment, as well as the disappearance of traditional forms of production like the artisanal or manual production of corn tortillas, ”which will begin to be manufactured like compact discs.”

That panorama was described by Villalona, Rodríguez and other independent economists and delegates of non-governmental organisations taking part in a Dec. 10-13 seminar on the possible effects of the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) and other trade deals with the United States.

The seminar was organised by the Latin American Institute of Alternative Legal Services (ILSA).

The ”geographic logic” of free trade agreements is in line with ”the expansionist policy” of the United States, Héctor Moncayo, with ILSA, told IPS.

On Wednesday, the United States reached a free trade agreement with four Central American countries (Costa Rica withdrew at the last minute).

The next step, said Moncayo, will be efforts to negotiate agreements with the Andean nations.

Because the United States ”is a huge gravitational force in the continent,” the free trade agreements that will be most heavily promoted will be bilateral deals with Washington, he added.

The FTAA draft agreement reached by 34 trade ministers in Miami on Nov. 20, which was dubbed ”FTAA lite”, actually encourages the possibility of bilateral negotiations.

Two days before the ministerial meeting in Miami, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick sent a message to the U.S. Congress announcing that President George W. Bush wanted to start bilateral negotiations with Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia.

The four countries, which along with Venezuela make up the Andean Community, hope to continue enjoying the trade preferences they are granted by the U.S. Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA), in compensation for their anti-drug efforts.

Participants in the ILSA seminar pointed to the scant benefits felt by the majority of Latin Americans as a result of commodity exports, and due to the small proportion that manufactured products represent in overall exports.

Per capita export revenues range between 1,000 and 2,000 dollars in Chile, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Uruguay, and between 400 and 1,000 dollars in Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras and Paraguay.

The lowest per capita export revenues are found in Colombia (272 dollars) and Brazil (250 dollars), although the low rates are compensated by larger domestic markets – huge in the case of Brazil, Latin America’s giant, said the president of the Colombian Society of Economists, Amilkar Acosta.

The speakers said small and medium farmers are among those hit hardest by the negative impacts of free trade accords.

In El Salvador, the livelihoods of more than half a million farmers who grow fresh produce and grains and raise chickens and other livestock are jeopardised, while more than nine million dairy farmers in Central America are at risk of losing their source of income.

Referring to the lessons that other Latin American nations can learn from Chile’s experience with bilateral accords with the United States and the European Union, Manuel Riesco, with the Agricultural Consortium of the South, a Chilean group, told IPS that ”the best thing is to obtain the longest timeframes as possible, to gain time for the economy to adapt.”

Chile signed a free trade agreement with the EU in November 2002 and another with the United States in June 2003.

Riesco argued that ”it is important to understand that the agreements that are being negotiated will definitely be signed. We opposed them, but we obviously lost.”

”You don’t negotiate with the United States – you either sign on or you don’t,” he added.

The activist pointed to the very different effects that the free trade agreements have had on fruit farmers in central Chile, an area with a Pacific version of the Mediterranean climate, whose products find a strong market in North America, and on farmers in the south.

”The experience has been bad” for growers of traditional crops like cereals and grains, cooking oil producers, and dairy and beef farmers in five of Chile’s 13 regions, he explained.

Economist Cristian Candia, with Consumers International (CI), said ”the rights of consumers are absent in the negotiations.”

CI groups 250 consumer rights federations from 117 countries, including virtually all consumer rights groups in Latin America and the Caribbean.

”The free market in and of itself does not ensure any benefits for consumers, even though the free trade accords claim to do so,” he told IPS.

”Benefits for consumers are an afterthought, standing far behind the rights of investors,” he maintained.

In Candia’s view, free trade treaties ”consecrate the right to invest capital above all other economic and social rights.”

”We are witnessing ‘equal treatment’ under unequal conditions, which generates regressive situations in the distribution of wealth and in the sphere of social rights, in the North as well as the South,” said the activist.

Moncayo said he was in favour of ”continuing to fight” against the conditions imposed by the free trade agreements, and against the loss of livelihood suffered by significant groups of small and medium farmers throughout the region.

He also predicted that resistance to free trade agreements would be a central issue and a dividing point in elections in Central America next year.

With respect to Colombia, Moncayo said that despite the fact that the country’s team of negotiators says their strategy is ”to obtain the most, at the least possible cost, the reality is that the country’s main objective is to maintain the preferences it enjoys under the ATPDEA.”

But the benefits are not likely to remain in place, he said. After a meeting with U.S. lawmakers, Colombia’s Minister of Foreign Trade, Industry and Tourism, Jorge Botero, admitted that the legislators told him to forget about the ATPDEA, ”because it is going to expire,” and that they proposed ”starting from scratch in negotiations” of a bilateral treaty.

Former finance minister Juan Santos had already warned that ”the gringo negotiators go for the jugular vein, and I’m speaking out of experience.”

With regards to an eventual accord between the four Andean nations and the United States, Santos said ”we’re talking about negotiating with the world’s superpower, which will try to squeeze us dry, to the very last drop.”

He recommended finding a way ”to avoid sacrificing our markets in the treaty.”

Acosta, meanwhile, warned about the disadvantages that the FTAA and an eventual bilateral free trade agreement with the United States would have for Colombia, ”unless the current economic model is modified, because Colombia will be condemned to serve as Uncle Sam’s mascot.”

He grimaced when recalling the joy expressed by the Colombian delegation at the FTAA ministerial meeting in Miami. ”Remember that in the times of the Roman empire, the gladiators sent in to fight would stand before the emperor and say ”Hail, Caesar! Those who are about to die salute you!”

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