Summary
This document addresses the major topics on the official agenda of current trade negotiations (investment, finance, intellectual property rights, agriculture, market access, services, and dispute resolution), as well as issues that are of extreme social importance but which governments have ignored (human rights, sustainability, environment, labor, immigration, the role of the state, and gender). They should be considered as a complete package of proposals for positive economic integration.
General Principles:
Trade and investment should not be ends in themselves, but rather the instruments for achieving just and sustainable development. Citizens must have the right to participate in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of hemispheric social and economic policies. Central goals of these policies should be to promote economic sovereignty, social welfare, and reduced inequality at all levels.
Human Rights:
A common human rights agenda should form the overall framework for all hemispheric policies, and include mechanisms and institutions to ensure full implementation and enforcement. This agenda should promote the broadest definition of human rights, covering civil, political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights, gender equity, and rights relating to indigenous peoples and communities.
Environment:
Governments should subordinate trade and investment to policies that prioritize sustainability and environmental protection. They should also have the power to channel investment to environmentally sustainable activities, reject privatization of natural resources, eliminate policies that subsidize or encourage the use of fossil fuel energy, and use the precautionary principle in setting public policies. Natural resources must be used to serve people's basic needs, not simply as an object of market transactions.
Sustainability:
A regional model for sustainable and democratic development requires the incorporation of the principle and objective of sustainability in all of the subjects addressed. These issues should be negotiated with the objective of resolving - with the support of national policies - our region's grave social problems, including inequality, unemployment, and environmental degradation. The agreements must commit the member countries to comply with international treaties and conventions designed to protect the environment, minorities, workers' rights, women's rights and other social conquests. They should also provide practical measures designed to make those agreements effective at a national level.
Gender:
International conventions on women's rights should be central to all hemispheric policies. Women should have greater opportunities to participate in policy-making. Governments should also establish national laws to ensure affordable child care; address workplace sexual harassment; and implement the UN 20/20 initiative to allocate 20 percent of budgets to social programs. Women should have equal access to credit, education and other resources.
Labor:
Hemispheric policies should guarantee the basic rights of working men and women, create a fund to provide compensation to workers and communities suffering job losses, and promote the improvement of working and living standards of workers and their families.
Immigration:
Governments should adhere to international conventions on migrants' rights; ensure labor rights for all workers-regardless of immigration status-and severely penalize employers that violate these rights; grant amnesty to all undocumented workers within their borders; demilitarize border zones; and support international subsidies for areas that are major exporters of labor.
Role of the State:
Hemispheric policies should not undermine the ability of the nation state to meet its citizens' social and economic needs. Nation states should have the right to maintain public sector corporations and procurement policies that support national development goals. The goal of national regulations on the private sector should be to ensure that economic activities promote fair and sustainable development.
Education:
Education is not a commodity; it is a universal and fundamental social right that should be ensured through publicly funded services and should be the responsibility of the State. It should be excluded from agreements on the liberalization of services. Public education should be free and fully accessible in all areas and throughout people's lifetimes.
Communications:
The right to communications is the right to produce and send, as well as to receive information. Communications should be considered a public good and should be preserved and regulated for society's social and cultural benefit. Communications and mass media should be guided by ethical principles inspired by a culture of life and humanity.
Investment:
Investment should generate high-quality jobs, sustainable production, and economic stability. Governments should have the right to screen out investments that make no net contribution to development, especially speculative capital flows. Citizens groups and all levels of government should have the right to sue investors that violate investment rules. The NAFTA mechanism that allows investors to sue governments directly should be abolished and banned from other agreements.
Finance:
100% of all debts of low-income countries and the illegitimate debts of middle-income countries should be canceled. Highly indebted countries should have their debts reduced in order to avoid crises in their balance of payments, pressures to exploit natural resources unsustainably and the other negative economic, social and environmental consequences that result from efforts to service debts that have already been paid. World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs must be abandoned, and those institutions either fundamentally restructured or replaced. Countries should be allowed to impose controls on capital flows and a multilateral mechanism should be developed to regulate speculative activity. Governments should have the power to establish their own monetary and financial policies and resist dollarization.
Intellectual Property:
Governments should have the power to establish intellectual property rules that reflect their specific social, cultural and economic contexts. This should include the right to provisions to guarantee access to essential drugs and protect biodiversity, indigenous knowledge, and traditional and farming communities. All life forms should be excluded from patentability.
Agriculture:
Countries should assume the responsibility to ensure that their populations have food. Governments should have the right to protect or exclude staple foods from trade agreements. There should be a democratization of decisionmaking on agricultural, fishery and environmental polices, and especially land reform policy, that fully involves small-scale farmers. No element of any international integration agreement should limit the ability of the nation state to promote and consolidate that process.
Market Access:
Developing countries should work with developed countries to implement special policies to address the inequalities between our countries. The current dominant principle of "national treatment," which requires governments to treat foreign investors and products no less favorably than domestic ones, severely restricts national development planning. Governments should be allowed to pursue policies to strengthen domestic demand rather than relying entirely on external markets. Government must have sovereign rights to provide subsidies and fiscal incentives to productive services that reflect legitimate social interests.
Services:
Basic services such as education, health care, energy, water and other utilities should be available to all people throughout the hemisphere. In order to reach this goal, those public services should not be privatized or left to the forces of so-called market rules. Countries should promote national development interests and prioritize environmental and other social concerns above the goal of efficient resource allocation. Governments must also develop and maintain the technical and institutional capacity to effectively regulate services.
Enforcement and Dispute Resolution:
If the proposed policies are to be meaningful, they must be accompanied by dispute resolution and enforcement mechanisms that are focused on reducing inequalities and based on fair and democratic processes. These should be designed to create sufficient incentives to encourage compliance so that enforcement actions can be avoided. This would involve an assessment of compliance in each country, action plans to address obstacles to compliance, and, as a last resort, the withholding of trade agreement benefits for corporate violators and/or governments with a record of pervasive non-enforcement.