About the FTAA

The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), currently being negotiated by 34 countries of the Americas, is intended by its architects to be the most far-reaching trade agreement in history. Although it is based on the model of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it goes far beyond NAFTA in its scope and power. The FTAA, as it now stands, would introduce into the Western Hemisphere all the disciplines of the proposed services agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO) - the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) - with the powers of the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), to create a new trade powerhouse with sweeping new authority over every aspect of life in Canada and the Americas.

The goal of the FTAA is to impose the failed NAFTA model of increased privatization and deregulation hemisphere-wide. Imposition of these rules would empower corporations to constrain governments from setting standards for public health and safety, to safeguard their workers, and to ensure corporations do not pollute the communities in which they operate. Effectively, these rules would handcuff governments' public interest policymaking and enhance corporate control at the expense of citizens throughout the Americas. FTAA would deepen the negative effects of NAFTA we've seen in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. over the past seven years and expand NAFTA's damage to the other countries involved. The FTAA would intensify NAFTA's "race to the bottom": under FTAA, exploited workers in Mexico could be leveraged against even more desperate workers in Haiti, Guatemala or Brazil by companies seeking tariff-free access back into U.S. markets.

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. From the beginning, the big corporations and their associations and lobby groups have been an integral part of the process. In the U.S., a variety of corporate committees advise the American negotiators and, under the Trade Advisory Committee system, over 500 corporate representatives have security clearance and access to FTAA negotiating documents. At the November 1999 ministerial meeting in Toronto, the Ministers of Trade of the Americas agreed to implement 20 "business facilitation measures" within the year in order to speed up customs integration.

Further pressure has been placed on obtaining a successful FTAA in the light of the defeat of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) at the first ministerial meeting of the WTO in 1996 and at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1998, and the shut-down of the "Millennium Round" meeting of the WTO in Seattle in December 1999. In fact, WTO officials are finding it difficult to even secure a venue for a new Ministerial meeting. As well, APEC - the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum - is faltering and few have expectations that it will make thehoped-for breakthrough to become a free trade and investment zone.

Many trade observers and pundits have identified the FTAA as the natural heir of these failed projects and are fearful that another such failure could put the whole concept of these massive free trade agreements on the back burner for years. In fact, in a January 2000 statement, Associate United States Trade Representative Peter Allegeier said that the FTAA has taken on new importance after the fiasco in Seattle and may well aspire to go further than the WTO, freed of the need to play the deals off against one another.

We can use NAFTA as a model to predict the impact of the FTAA on forests. After signing NAFTA, all three NAFTA countries lowered protections for forests and biodiversity; fifteen U.S. forest product companies set up new operations in Mexico taking advantage of lower environmental and labor safeguards; and one U.S. corporation, Boise Cascade, has been linked to extreme human rights abuses against forest protection activists in Mexico. Boise Cascade has also been blocked in its plans to open the world's largest chip mill in the heart of Chile's endangered rainforests by Chilean and U.S. citizen opposition. However, the FTAA could be the silver bullet the company needs to push their plans to completion.The FTAA would promote unbridled hemisphere-wide consumption of forest products without a single forest or biodiversity safeguard. U.S. negotiators expect that the FTAA will also include investment liberalization initiatives like those included in NAFTA and the ill-fated Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) that allow corporations to sue governments if environmental laws cause their properties to lose economic value.

The Clinton Administration has spear-headed negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) on a proposal dubbed by forest advocates as the "Global Free Logging Agreement (GFLA)." After losing its bid (for now) to have the GFLA at the WTO, the Administration appears to have set its sites on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) as a new venue to push for the proposal which threatens forests and biodiversity

In fact, a representative of the United States Trade Representative's office confirmed that the FTAA Market Access Negotiating Group is negotiating tariff elimination and non-tariff trade barrier (|NTB) removal for forest products. NTBs are forest and species protections that are argued to interfere with free trade.

Tariff elimination could increase the consumption of forest products, while the elimination of NTBs could threaten existing and future forest protection laws and initiatives. Current logging practices have decimated the world's forests. An increase in such unsustainable practices caused by the GFLA will hasten the deforestation of the world's native forests.

With a GFLA, U.S. laws designed to protect forests, the environment and small locally owned mills can be challenged under the FTAA as NTBs. If challenged and defeated, these laws would have to be eliminated or the U.S. would face costly trade sanctions. The record of trade agreements vs. the environment thus far proves that when faced with a trade-off between "free trade" and environmental protection -- the environment always losses. The GFLA will put these laws are greater risk through the FTAA.

Forest protections that could be threatened include a ban on the export of raw logs from federal and most state lands to protect small local mills and reduce logging; federal and state green procurement laws such as those requiring the use of recycled paper; eco-labeling and certification laws used to identify environmentally friendly products such as sustainably harvested wood; and laws to protect against invasive species invasions.

Increasingly, international trade agreements overrule domestic laws designed to protect the environment and civil society. International trade agreements also take priority over international agreements that set environmental targets such as the Convention on Biological Diversity or the Kyoto Protocol. Such agreements are bargained on good faith and not legally binding whereas the FTAA and NAFTA are.

The Canadian government's recently published "position paper" on the FTAA contains a reference to the environment in its proposed Preamble. It calls for the FTAA to commit to "Better protecting the environment and promoting sustainable development by adopting trade and environmental policies that are mutually supportive." However, Preambular language in trade agreements is non-binding and unenforceable, so any promise in this section of the agreement is fairly meaningless. In any case, it is not possible to find compatibility between a trade agreement that contains investor-state rights for corporations and environmental stewardship.

As a result, if environmental or social regulations interfere with the ability of a transnational corporation to make a profit those regulations will most likely be eliminated. The FTAA pays lip service to the maintenance of biodiversity and a healthy environment throughout its literature. However, as they “strive to make our trade liberalization and environmental policies mutually supportive” it is clear that the environment will always take the back burner to the economy.

One initiative that many communities are taking to protect the environment is by having strong procurement policies. This means that a school, city, province or state, nation or other group sets up regulations surrounding the types of products purchased. For example, many cities have policies that state they will not purchase old-growth wood unless it is ecologically certified. This is because only 1/5 of the world’s ancient forests remain.

Big-business considers this to be an unfair barrier to trade or a non-tariff trade measure (NTM). Many trade agreements argue that there is no difference between products if their final purpose is the same. This means that if something is produced in an ecologically friendly manner or by clearcutting or other devastating ways, there is no difference. Governments cannot discriminate between the two products under the FTAA.

Also, under the FTAA, other NTMs will be illegal. This could include eco-certification, or labeling a product to identify that it was produced in an environmentally friendly manner. It may be illegal to identify products that are more environmentally friendly (such as if something is recycled, if it is second growth, if it is not genetically engineered, etc.) under the FTAA.