Time to stop the roller-coaster of globalisation!
In April the Summit of the Americas will take place in Québec City. In these post-Seattle days it is no longer possible for the governments of the world and their friends in the boardrooms of the multinationals to discuss how to rip us off more effectively without their plans being challenged.
People all over the world, whether or not they will make it to the protests in Québec, want to know what sinister new rules are being devised which will
Make our lives as workers even more intolerable and dangerous than before
Sell off even more of our scarce public services
Destroy even more of our fragile planet
Con us into buying even more overpriced brand goods
The Québec summit is an important step on the road to implement the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)– an expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement implemented on January 1 1994 to cover the whole of the western hemisphere.
FTAA is scheduled for implementation in 2005 and discussions about its development began at the Miami summit in 1994, immediately after NAFTA itself came into effect.
Trade ministers from 34 countries – that is all countries in the hemisphere apart from Cuba – were involved in the discussions.
However little actually happened until a second summit took place in Santiago in April 1998, which set up an ongoing Trade Negotiations Committee (TNC) consisting of vice ministers of trade from each of the states.
Nine working groups were also agreed, which deal with the major areas covered by the project: agriculture, services, investment, dispute settlement, intellectual property rights, subsidies and anti-dumping, competition policy, government procurement and market access.
These bodies have been meeting on a regular basis – every couple of months – to agree proposals on these distinct areas and prepare a first draft text which was completed last December.
The Québec City meeting will be the first opportunity to consider this work – essential if the 2005 implementation is to be achieved.
No texts from these debates are publicly available – the negotiations take place essentially in secret unless you happen to be a representative of big business. Over 500 corporate representatives in the US have security clearance and access to FTAA NAFTA expansion documents.
Organisations such as the Organisation of American States (OAS), Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), collectively known as the "Tripartite Committee", also provide direction.
There is no voice for civil society – demands of NGOs to have access were rejected and instead a Committee of Government Representatives on Civil Society was established to represent the views of civil society to the TNC.
What is clear however, despite these attempts to keep us in the dark, is the stark outline of this political project, the aim of which is to deepen exploitation still further.
Essentially this will be an extension of NAFTA itself to a larger region – it is already reported that a whole number of the preparatory texts are literally based on the equivalent NAFTA texts, just with more countries added in. This is why activists preparing for Québec have been drawing out the lessons of NAFTA to make clear what will be at stake if we don’t stop this neo-liberal roller-coaster.