Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean, North America

AMERICAS: FTAA Yet to Win the Hearts of Civil Society

By Rogelio Santo Domingo

MIAMI, Nov 18 2003 (IPS) - While tough negotiations on tariffs, farm subsidies and intellectual property rights are taking place inside the Intercontinental Hotel here, the battle to win support from civil society, perhaps a requisite for building hemisphere-wide consensus, is just getting started.

The negotiations for creating the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), underway in the south-eastern U.S. city of Miami, are taking place just as advertised: slowly, behind closed doors and heavy with emotionless terminology.

Even though their consequences will have enormous political weight, what delegates are discussing are technical matters related to trade and economy. An observer might have to make an effort to pay attention even at the moments of greatest tensions in these talks.

But the difficulties for launching a trade integration treaty for the 34 countries of the western hemisphere (all except Cuba) are not only found at the negotiating table, but also among peasant farmer organisations, labour unions and civil society groups that are expressing their anti-FTAA sentiments on the streets.

Miami is expecting more than 20,000 protesters, with the climax coming Thursday and Friday, when the trade ministers of North and South America and the Caribbean are to gather. The activists have promised to “a people’s trial of the FTAA”.

The anti-FTAA activists, in contrast to the impassive trade officials, are holding attention-getting demonstrations and making rabble-rousing speeches.

It is no surprise that the news media are following the demonstrators, keeping an eye out for provocative actions, like the group of protesters who gathered nude on Monday outside the GAP clothing store in Miami Beach.

And the spotlight will surely shine on the small radical groups if they decided to challenge the massive deployment of more than 2,500 police.

The protesters who challenge the inequalities of an unfettered market are much more interesting to the general public than a speech from U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick.

Proof is in the group of nude activists, who have travelled across Canada and the United States taking off their clothes in front of GAP stores everywhere.

Allison, a topless spokeswoman for the group, said, “We must boycott a company that exploits its employees in the Third World for the benefit of the few and with the complicity of the U.S. government.”

A GAP spokesperson responded that the company regularly inspects its factories to ensure that they are in compliance with worker health and safety standards, and that it stops doing business with any partner that sullies the company name.

Walking slowly in the Florida heat are a hundred workers and farmers who decided to make the 34-mile (54 km) journey on foot from Fort Lauderdale to Miami. “One mile for each country affected by this damned agreement,” said immigrant Lucas Benítez, a leader of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, based in northern Florida.

Benítez, who along with his coalition colleagues Julia Gabriel and Romeo Ramírez last month won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, says free trade agreements are a scam.

“I am a Mexican, and I know (they are a scam) from my own experience,” he said. “The Mexican countryside is poorer today, since the free trade agreement with the United States and Canada. We say ‘no’ to the FTAA because it will only increase profits for a handful of transnational corporations.”

Benítez believes that the only way to salvage these agreements is to include the people who will be affected by them in the negotiations. “The FTAA should include basic workers’ rights, such as decent wages, respect and dignity in the workplace, and ensuring a space for the small and medium entrepreneur,” he adds.

Late Monday, the activists received an unsettling message. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist and former unionist seen as a champion of the fight against the abuses of the free market, said that those who aspire to greater equality in the distribution of wealth must fight from within the beast, debating in forums like the FTAA.

“If they want to be heard, poor countries will have to express their interests in a broader way. They must take to the negotiating table the paradoxes of globalisation,” Lula said.

That is just what some non-governmental organisations (NGOs), like Oxfam International, are trying to do. The Britain-based Oxfam is one of the most active civil society groups taking part in the FTAA discussions.

An Oxfam representative at the Miami meetings, Fernanda Castejón, told IPS that the NGO is not blindly opposed to the FTAA or to the idea of free trade.

“Oxfam understands the potential of trade and the free market for fighting poverty and having a positive impact on regional development. And we also believe in regional integration. Sure, why not? But for this agreement to have that positive impact requires elements that the FTAA is lacking,” she said.

Oxfam is also critical of the “flexible” approach to the FTAA agreed by Brazil and the United States, the co-chairs of the negotiating process. The group says it will not resolve the contradictions at the core of the agreement.

The United States rejects Brazil’s demands that it cut farm subsidies, while Brazil opposed the proposed texts on government procurement, intellectual property and foreign investment.

The two countries, co-chairs of the negotiations, finally agreed on a minimum draft that leaves the thorniest matters to be dealt with by the World Trade Organisation, sets a timeline for trade liberalisation, allows countries to establish bilateral agreements within the general framework of the FTAA, and gives governments the opportunity to opt out of particular provisions.

Castejón said the Brazil-U.S. proposal, also referred to as “FTAA a la carte”, is simply whitewashing to make the treaty look friendlier to the poor.

“This flexible agreement brings to light the contradictions existing between countries in achieving a truly integrated market,” said the Oxfam activist.

“There can be no FTAA as long as there are farm subsidies in the rich countries, as long as there are intellectual property rights that impede poor countries’ access to inexpensive medicines, as long as there is disloyal competition and as long as they attempt to discuss issues in regional forums that should be resolved in the WTO,” she said.

The negotiators are to announce a formal declaration on Friday that would pave the way for hemisphere-wide free trade after 2005.

But building consensus perhaps will require greater sacrifice than the delegates shut inside the Intercontinental Hotel imagine, as they are surrounded by police and watched over by helicopters. The battle to win the hearts of the people on the street has not even begun.