Alliance for Responsible Trade

The United States has taken a distinctively aggressive attitude in matters of trade. In spite of the flowery rhetoric about trade being the road to development, 14 years of experience with the ramifications have shown their true motivation, of enhancing corporate profits at the expense of the collective well being. All other values are subjected to maximizing profits for the corporations.

Their strategy has been an agile one, of pursuing multilateral, hemispheric, regional and individual country agreements all at the same time, in order to guarantee that their agenda moves forward. At the same time, each subsequent agreement becomes a kind of ‘floor' for the next agreement, each one granting new concessions to the corporations, and reducing the rights of states to protect the interests of their people.

We have witnessed the worst of unethical, threatening and bullying behavior from our government in ramming these agreements down the throats of even countries which are considered allies. During the CAFTA implementation process, the legislature of Guatemala was forced to revise over and over their legislation until it was considered ‘up to the standard' of what the U.S. viewed as the agreement which had been signed, even though that differed substantially from what Guatemala had understood they were signing. In this case, many of the issues were around intellectual property issues, and since Guatemala has a thriving generic drug industry, they were seeking to protect that industry. Clearly the outcome of this bullying behavior will be more expensive medicines for the entire region.

Investor protection provisions, combined with mandates from the International Financial Institutions will result in the privatization of public services, with subsequent price increases, making many of them unaffordable for the majority of the impoverished residents of the region. All of these impacts serve to unmask the real intention of the United States, which is to preserve the level of inequality, and enhance our ability to continue extracting profits from these countries. By insisting on these agreements, we assure that future governments which may be elected are straight jacketed from implementing more progressive policies by the existence of these agreements.

We believe that this type of trade policy is shortsighted and counterproductive to our long term best interests. The European Union, while also in many ways acting to defend their interests, has had a much more enlightened view of how to relate to their neighbors. Rather than legislating the authority to extract as much as possible from neighboring countries, they have spent generously in an effort to bring the poorer countries to a higher standard. We think that trade policy needs to be reviewed and revised from the bottom up. The Alternatives document, produced by the Hemispheric Social Alliance offers a view of what a different trade model might entail.