Kinesia Paralenguistica

The Free Trade Area of the Americas and the Threat to Social Programs, 
Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice 
in Canada and the Americas 
by Maude Barlow 
February 2001


|Contents |
|Summary |
|What Is the FTAA? ||What's in the FTAA? |
|What Is Canada's Position on the FTAA? |
|What Impact Will the FTAA Have on Canadians? |
|What Impact Will the FTAA Have on |
|      the Countries of Latin America? |
|Conclusion ||Sources |

Summary
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 andpower. 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 Canadaand the Americas.
The GATS, now being negotiated in Geneva, is mandated to liberalize the global trade in services, including all public programs, and gradually phase out all government "barriers" to international competition in the services sector. The Trade Negotiations Committee of the FTAA, led by Canada in the crucial formative months when the first draft was written, is proposing a similar,even expanded, services agreement in the hemispheric pact. It is also proposing to retain, and perhaps expand, the "investor-state" provisions of NAFTA, which give corporations unprecedented rights to pursue their trade interests through legally binding trade tribunals.
Combining these two powers into one agreement will give unequalled new rights to the transnational corporations of the hemisphereto compete for and even challenge every publicly funded service of its governments, including health care, education, social security, culture and environmental protection. 
As well, the proposed FTAA contains new provisions on competition policy, government procurement, market access and dispute settlement that, together with the inclusion of services and investment, could remove the ability ofall the governments of the Americas to create or maintain laws, standards and regulations to protect the health, safety and well-being of their citizens and the environment they share. Moreover, the FTAA negotiators appear to have chosen to emulate the WTO rather than NAFTA in key areas of standard-setting and dispute settlement, where the WTO rules are tougher.
Essentially, what the FTAAnegotiators 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.
Once again, as in former trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO, this free trade agreement will contain no safeguards in the body of the textto protect workers, human rights, social security or health and environmental standards. Once again civil society and the majority of citizens who want a different kind of trade agreement have been excluded from the negotiations and will be shut out of the deliberations in Quebec City in April 2001.
However, the stakes for the peoples of the Americas have never been higher, and it appears a...