Eight Reasons Congress Should Continue Opposing the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement
There are still no meaningful labor protections in Colombia
Nearly 2,700 trade unionists have been killed since 1986 – more than the rest of the world combined. Less than 3% of unionist murders have been prosecuted. Over 480 unionists have been murdered since the current right-wing president, A´lvaro Uribe, has been in power. Human rights groups have documented collusion between the Uribe government and murderous paramilitary groups on these and other issues. And the number of unionists killed in 2008 (49) represented a 25 percent increase over the previous year.
Lose-lose investment rules undermine U.S. & Colombian courts, promote offshoring of U.S. jobs and hurt Colombia’s development
The FTA allows any foreign investor operating in Colombia (including from China, Europe and beyond) to directly sue the U.S. government in World Bank and UN tribunals over government actions that investors believe undermine their expected future profits, allowing them to undermine U.S. laws and skirt domestic courts and bring their disputes over federal construction contracts and natural resource concessions on federal lands to foreign tribunals.
FTAs do not increase net U.S. exports
Corporate proponents of the Colombia FTA use one major economic talking point: they say U.S. exports to nations with which we have FTAs are booming ahead of exports with non-FTA nations. The Bush administration argued this point for most of the 110th Congress. What they did not mention is:
The United States has a $192 billion trade deficit with our FTA partner countries, as imports from these countries continue to outpace U.S. exports to these countries.
The average annual U.S. export growth rate to our 14 FTA partners is less than half that to non-FTA nations, amounting to a $77 billion export penalty.
FTA agriculture rules would displace hundreds of thousands of Colombian campesino farmers
The Colombian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs conducted a study of the effects of liberalization on nine primary agricultural products and found that full liberalization would lead to a 35% decrease in employment. The FTA requires Colombia to zero out its tariffs on agricultural goods, but does not discipline U.S. subsidies on agricultural goods. As a result, the FTAs will lead to dumping of subsidized U.S. farm goods in Colombia, where a large percentage of the population relies on agriculture for their livelihoods. NAFTA’s similar rules resulted in 2.4 million family farmers losing their rural livelihoods, according to Mexican government and civil society numbers.
The FTA will disproportionately hurt Afro-Colombian communities
The FTA’s expansive foreign investor rights would empower multinational corporations investing in rural projects with corporate rights that would make restoration of Afro-Colombian lands extremely difficult, even when Afro-Colombian communities win in Colombian courts.
The FTA will undermine U.S. national security
As Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz noted, the upheaval that this agreement will have on rural livelihoods is a self-defeating course that will mean “there will be more violence and the U.S. will have to spend more on coca eradication.” The Washington Post editorial board warned in February 2006 that the “rural dislocation that would follow from ending all protection for Colombian farmers could undermine the government’s efforts to pacify the countryside. If farmers can’t grow rice, they are more likely to grow coca.”
The FTA endangers the Amazon basin, the lungs of the planet
The upper Amazon basin in Colombia is among the most bio-diverse areas on earth, but is also very much at risk. Deforestation, horrific pollution, and health disasters from oil production and mining are widespread already. The special foreign investor privileges in the FTA empowers corporations to pillage the area for timber, mineral and energy resources, and would chill direly needed efforts to protect the Amazon basin.
It will lead to an even more harmful hemispheric-wide agreement
The Colombia FTA is a stepping stone to a hemisphere-wide NAFTA, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) which would pose a massive threat to U.S. farmers. The Colombia pact is part of a corporate strategy to pressure more progressive governments in Latin America into reversing opposition to the FTAA, and to put the FTAA into effect country-by-country. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that an FTAA would lead to surges of Brazilian and Argentine agribusiness exports of beef, citrus, sugar, soy, and cereals. Export surges from these nations’ agribusinesses countries would seriously undercut U.S. family farmers. We need to fix the trade system that has bankrupted American family farmers, not expand it.
