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by Maude Barlow
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 and power. 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 Canada and 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 hemisphere
to 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 of all 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 FTAA negotiators 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 text to 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 confrontation is inevitable.
BACK TO TOP
What Is the FTAA?
The Free Trade Area of the Americas is the name given to the
process of expanding the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) to all the other countries of the Western Hemisphere
except Cuba. With a population of 800 million and a combined
GDP of $11 trillion (US), the FTAA would be the largest free
trade zone in the world. If reports coming from the Negotiating
Groups working on the key elements of the deal are correct,
the FTAA will become the most far-reaching free trade agreement
in the world, with a scope that will reach into every area
of life for the citizens of the Americas.
The FTAA was launched by the leaders of 34 countries of North,
Central and South America and the Caribbean at the December
1994 Summit of the Americas in Miami, Florida. At that meeting,
then President Bill Clinton pledged to fulfil former President
George Bush's dream of a free-trade agreement stretching from
Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego, linking the economies of the
hemisphere as well as deepening social and political integration
among the countries based on the same free-market model as
NAFTA.
However, little real progress was made until the next Summit
of the Americas, this one held in Santiago, Chile, in April
1998, at which time the countries set up a Trade Negotiations
Committee (TNC), consisting of the vice ministers of trade
from each country. With support from a Tripartite Committee
made up of the Inter-American Development Bank, the Organization
of American States and the UN Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), nine Working Groups were
established to deal with the major areas of negotiations:
services; investment; government procurement; market access
(covering tariffs, non-tariff measures, customs procedures,
rules of origin, standards and technical barriers to trade);
agriculture; intellectual property rights; subsidies, anti-dumping
and countervailing duties; competition policy; and dispute
settlement. As well, three non-negotiating special committees
were established to deal with the issues of smaller economies,
civil society and electronic commerce.
These committees and working groups have been meeting with
increasing frequency throughout 1999 and 2000 and the early
part of 2001, regularly bringing over 900 trade negotiators
and mountains of material to Miami where most of the meetings
take place.
From the beginning, the big corporations and their associations
and lobby groups have been an integral part of the process.
In the U.S., a variety of corporate committees advise the
American negotiators and, under the Trade Advisory Committee
system, over 500 corporate representatives have security clearance
and access to FTAA negotiating documents. At the November
1999 ministerial meeting in Toronto, the Ministers of Trade
of the Americas agreed to implement 20 "business facilitation
measures" within the year in order to speed up customs
integration.
One of the tasks of the negotiators is to compare and consolidate
the key components of a variety of trade and investment agreements
throughout the area, including:
* NAFTA - a free trade and investment
agreement between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico
* MERCOSUR - a common market of
the Southern Cone countries of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay
and Uruguay
* the Andean Pact
* Caricom - the Caribbean Community
As well, a number of Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITS)
have been signed between individual countries, based on the
"investor-state" model of NAFTA, whereby corporations
can directly sue governments for alleged property rights violations
without first involving their own governments.
There are some differences among these pacts and agreements;
MERCOSUR's goal, for example, is to become a common market,
whereas NAFTA has not attempted to establish common labour
standards among its three members and the U.S. clearly would
not tolerate the free movement of labour from Mexico. And
MERCOSUR does contain some social provisions and programs
for displaced workers that are absent from NAFTA. But the
similarities between these treaties far outweigh the differences.
Both NAFTA and MERCOSUR include measures to deregulate foreign
investment and grant national treatment (non-discriminatory)
rights to foreign investors. Both prohibit "performance
requirements" whereby foreign investment must enhance
the local economy and support local workers. And both are
based on a model of trade and investment liberalization that
locks in the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) introduced
earlier into Latin America by the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund (IMF).
Under these programs, most developing countries were forced
to:
* abandon domestic industry in favour of transnational corporate
interests
* turn their best agricultural lands over to export crops
to pay off their national debt
* curtail public spending on social programs and abandon universal
health care, education and social security programs
* deregulate their electricity, transportation, energy and
natural resources sectors
* remove regulatory impediments to foreign investment
Tensions of leadership exist in the negotiations. Since 1995,
the U.S. Adminstration has been unsuccessful in obtaining
renewal for its "fast-track" legislation, which
basically authorizes Congress to adopt free trade agreements
in full. This has given Brazil, the undisputed economic leader
in Latin America, the opportunity to challenge U.S. supremacy
in the negotiations and bid to lead the process of economic
integration of the Americas. As well, the encroachment of
the business community of the European Union into Latin America,
especially in banking, telecommunications, automobiles and
consumer products, has served as a catalyst for the United
States to reassert its leadership in the hemisphere. The EU
has been intensifying its presence in the region, negotiating
individual free trade and investment agreements with countries
such as Chile, Mexico and Brazil. The U.S. is counting on
the successful completion of the FTAA to maintain the dominance
of its corporate sector in the region.
Further pressure has been placed on obtaining a successful
FTAA in the light of the defeat of the Multilateral Agreement
on Investment (MAI) at the first ministerial meeting of the
WTO in 1996 and at the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) in 1998, and the shut-down of the "Millennium
Round" meeting of the WTO in Seattle in December 1999.
In fact, WTO officials are finding it difficult to even secure
a venue for a new Ministerial meeting. As well, APEC - the
Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum - is faltering and
few have expectations that it will make the hoped-for breakthrough
to become a free trade and investment zone.
Many trade observers and pundits have identified the FTAA
as the natural heir of these failed projects and are fearful
that another such failure could put the whole concept of these
massive free trade agreements on the back burner for years.
In fact, in a January 2000 statement, Associate United States
Trade Representative Peter Allegeier said that the FTAA has
taken on new importance after the fiasco in Seattle and may
well aspire to go further than the WTO, freed of the need
to play the deals off against one another.
The next ministerial-level Summit of the Americas is to be
held in Quebec City in April 2001. At this Summit, leaders
will be presented with a heavily bracketed first draft for
a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, out of whi ch they
will start to fashion a full text. The agreement was originally
intended to be completed for implementation by 2005, but some
countries, including Chile and the United States, are pushing
to move the ratification date up to 2003, depending on how
far negotiators get at the Quebec City Summit meeting.
BACK TO TOP
What's in the FTAA?
Essentially, the planned FTAA is an expansion of the existing
NAFTA, both in terms of including many new countries in the
pact and in terms of extending free trade's reach into new
sectors, based on tough new WTO provisions. In a statement
that accompanied the original 1994 Miami Summit, the Ministers
made a series of recommendations in the form of a Declaration.
In it, they said that agreement had been reached on several
key "Objectives and Principles," including:
* economic integration of the hemisphere
* promotion of the integration of capital markets
* consistency with the World Trade Organization (WTO)
* elimination of barriers and non-tariff barriers to trade
* elimination of agricultural export subsidies
* elimination of barriers to foreign investment
* a legal framework to protect investors and their investments
* enhanced government procurement measures
* new negotiations on the inclusion of services
Since then, information about just what is contained in the
FTAA working documents has been sparse. However, from meetings
with the United States Trade Representative's office, members
of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch report that the U.S.
is intent on liberalizing services, including health care,
education, environmental services and water services. As well,
the FTAA will include provisions on investment similar to
those in the defeated Multilateral Agreement on Investment
and Chapter 11 of NAFTA, whereby corporations will be able
to sue governments directly for lost profit resulting from
the passage of laws designed to protect health and safety,
working conditions or environmental standards.
The "Miami Group" - the U.S., Canada, Argentina
and Chile - are also intent on forcing all countries of the
Americas to accept biotechnology and genetically modified
foods (GMOs), thereby promoting the interests of biotech companies
such as Cargill, Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland over
the survival needs of small farmers, peasants and communities
throughout Latin America. Finally, reports Public Citizen,
the U.S. is trying to expand NAFTA's corporate protectionism
rules on patents to the hemisphere, rules that give a company
with a patent in one country the monopoly marketing rights
to the item throughout the region, thereby robbing local people
of access to traditional medicines.
As well, reports from the negotiators themselves have inadvertently
found their way into the public domain. An October 7, 1999
confidential report from the Negotiating Group on Services
was recently leaked; it contains detailed plans for the services
provisions of the FTAA. Sherri M. Stephenson, Deputy Director
for Trade with the Organization of American States, prepared
a paper for a March, 2000 trade conference in Dallas, Texas,
in which she reported on the mandate and progress of the nine
Working Groups by sector. FTAA Web sites and Canadian government
documents contain important information as well.
Put together, these reports expose a plan to create the most
far-reaching trade agreement ever negotiated. The combination
of a whole new services agreement in the FTAA combined with
the existing (and perhaps even extended) NAFTA investment
provisions represent a whole new threat to every aspect of
life for Canadians. This powerful combination will give transnational
corporations of the hemisphere important new rights, even
in the supposedly protected areas of health care, social security,
education, environmental protection services, water delivery,
culture, natural resource protection and all government services
- federal, provincial and municipal.
BACK TO TOP
Mandates of the Nine Negotiating Groups
1. Services
The mandate of the Negotiating Group on Services is massive:
"To establish disciplines to progressively liberalize
trade in services, so as to permit the achievement of a hemispheric
free trade area under conditions of certainty and transparency"
and to develop a framework "incorporating comprehensive
rights and obligations in services." It is a new agreement
and meant to be compatible with the General Agreement on Trade
in Services (GATS) - the WTO services negotiations now in
progress. The General Agreement on Trade in Services was established
in 1994, at the conclusion of the "Uruguay Round"
of the GATT and was one of the trade agreements adopted for
inclusion when the WTO was formed in 1995. Negotiations were
to begin five years later with the view of "progressively
raising the level of liberalization." These talks got
under way as scheduled in February 2000, chaired by Canada's
Ambassador to the WTO (and former International Trade Minister)
Sergio Marchi. The common goal of Europe, the U.S. and Canada
is to reach a general agreement by December 2002. It is called
a "multilateral framework agreement," which means
that its broad commission was defined at its inception and
then, through permanent negotiations, new sectors and rules
are to be added. Essentially, the GATS is mandated to restrict
government actions in regards to services through a set of
legally binding constraints backed up by WTO-enforced trade
sanctions. Its most fundamental purpose is to constrain all
levels of government in their delivery of services and to
facilitate access to government contracts by transnational
corporations in a multitude of areas, including health care,
hospital care, home care, dental care, child care, elder care,
education (primary, secondary and post-secondary), museums,
libraries, law, social assistance, architecture, energy, water
services, environmental protection services, real estate,
insurance, tourism, postal services, transportation, publishing,
broadcasting and many others.
The FTAA negotiating services agreement is even more sweeping
than the GATS. As well as incorporating "comprehensive
rights and obligations," it will apply to "all measures
[defined by Canada as 'laws, rules, and other official regulatory
acts'] affecting trade in services taken by governmental authorities
at all levels of government." As well, it is intended
to apply to "all measures affecting trade in services
taken by non-governmental institutions at all levels of government
when acting under powers conferred to them by government authorities."
The services agreement, says the Negotiating Group, should
have "universal coverage of all service sectors."
Governments are granted the right to "regulate"
these services, but only in ways compatible with the "disciplines
established in the context of the FTAA agreement." The
framework of the services agreement has six elements of consensus.
These include:
* sectoral coverage ("universal coverage of all service
sectors")
* most-favoured-nation treatment (access granted to investors
/ corporations from any one FTAA country must be granted to
investors / corporations from all FTAA countries)
* national treatment (investors/corporations from all FTAA
countries must be treated the same as domestic and local service
providers)
* market access ("additional disciplines to address measures
that restrict the ability of service providers to access markets")
* transparency (disciplines "making publicly available
all relevant measures which may include among others, new
laws, regulations, administrative guidelines, and international
agreements adopted at all levels of government that affect
trade in services")
* denial of benefits ("FTAA members should be able to
deny the benefits of the services agreement to a service supplier
that does not meet such criteria." Criteria could include
"ownership, control, residency, and substantial business
activities.")
This list represents sweeping new authorities of a trade agreement
to overrule government regulation and grants huge new powers
to service corporations under an expanded FTAA. For instance,
if national treatment rights in services are included in the
FTAA, all public services at all levels of government would
have to be opened up for competition from foreign for-profit
service corporations. This agreement would disallow any government
or sub-national government from preferential funding to domestic
service providers in services as diverse as health care, child
care, education, municipal services, libraries, culture, and
sewer and water services. The combination of this sweeping
services agreement with the proposed extension of the investment
rules grants unprecedented new powers to the FTAA and the
private interests it promotes. For the first time in any international
trade agreement, transnational service corporations will gain
competitive rights to the full range of government service
provisions and will have the right to sue any government that
resists for financial compensation. That the real goal of
this services/investment juggernaut is to reduce or destroy
the ability of the governments of the hemisphere to provide
publicly funded services (considered "monopolies"
in the world of international trade) is seen clearly in the
words of OAS Deputy Trade Director Stephenson:
"Since services do not face trade barriers in the form
of border tariffs or taxes, market access is restricted through
national regulations. Thus the liberalization of trade in
services implies modifications of national laws and regulations,
which make these negotiations more difficult and more sensitive
for governments."
The FTAA Negotiating Group on Services has requested the organization
of national inventories of measures affecting (i.e., inhibiting)
the free trade in services.
2. Investment
The mandate of the Negotiating Group on Investment is to establish
"a fair and trans_parent legal framework to promote investment
through the creation of a stable and predictable environment
that protects the investor, his investment and related flows,
without creating obstacles to investments from outside the
hemisphere." It builds on the investment chapter of NAFTA,
Chapter 11, which is, as legal trade expert Barry Appleton
explains, "the very heart and soul of NAFTA." NAFTA
was the first international trade agreement in the world to
allow a private interest, usually a corporation or an industry
sector, to bypass its own government and, although it is not
a signatory to the agreement, directly challenge the laws,
policies and practices of another NAFTA government if these
laws, policies and practices impinge on the established "rights"
of the corporation in question. Chapter 11 gives the corporation
the right to sue for compensation for lost current and future
profit from government actions, no matter how legal these
actions may be or for what purpose they have been taken. Chapter
11 was successfully used by Virginia-based Ethyl Corp. to
force the Canadian government to reverse its legislation banning
the cross-border sale of its product, MMT, an additive to
gasoline that has been banned in many countries and that Prime
Minister Jean Chretien once called a "dangerous neurotoxin."
S.D. Myers, an American PCB waste-disposal company, also successfully
used a Chapter 11 threat to force Canada to reverse its ban
on PCB exports - a ban Canada undertook in compliance with
the Basel Convention banning the transborder movement of hazardous
waste - and successfully sued the Canadian government for
$50 million (US) in damages for business it lost while the
short-lived ban was in place. Sun Belt Water Inc. of Santa
Barbara, California, is suing the Canadian government for
$14 billion because British Columbia banned the export of
bulk water in 1993, thereby closing any opportunities for
the company to get into the water-export business in that
province.
The Negotiating Group on Investment has made substantial progress
in including in the FTAA the same or enhanced investor-state
rights that exist currently in NAFTA, including:
* basic definitions of investment and investor
* scope of application (very broad)
* national treatment (whereby no country can discriminate
on behalf of its domestic sector)
* most-favoured-nation treatment (whereby access to investors
from one FTAA country must be given to investors of all FTAA
countries)
* expropriation and compensation for losses (whereby an "investor"
or corporation can claim financial compensation for lost business
and profit from the creation or implementation of regulation,
including environmental laws, from the government of another
NAFTA signatory)
* key personnel (the ability of corporations to move their
professionals and technicians across borders outside of the
normal immigration process)
* performance requirements (limits on or the elimination of
a country's right to place performance requirements on foreign
investment)
* dispute settlement (whereby a panel of appointed trade bureaucrats
can override government legislation or force the government
in question to pay compensation in order to maintain the legislation)
The inclusion of such sweeping investment provisions is a
way of introducing a form of the Multilateral Agreement on
Investment, a proposed OECD investment treaty that was abandoned
in the face of massive civil society resistance, into the
FTAA. Combined with proposed strengthened provisions on market
access, agriculture and intellectual property rights and sweeping
new proposed provisions on services and government procurement,
these investment provisions will grant new powers to the corporations
of the hemisphere. Such powers will allow them to challenge
all government regulations and activities, and undermine the
ability of all governments to provide social security and
health protection to their citizens.
3. Government Procurement
The mandate of the Negotiating Group on Government is very
cl ear: "To expand access to the government procurement
markets of the FTAA countries" within a new agreement.
This will be done by achieving a "normative framework
that ensures openness and transparency of government procurement
processes," ensuring "non-discrimination in government
procurement" and "impartial and fair review for
the resolution of procurement complaints."
This FTAA mandate on government procurement appears to go
further than that of the FTAA's WTO counterpart, the WTO Agreement
on Government Procurement, whose aim is to prevent governments
from fostering domestic economic development when purchasing
goods. Measures targeted by the WTO include favouring local
or national suppliers, setting domestic content standards
or imposing community investment rules. For now, the WTO does
not enforce market access or national treatment rules on the
purchase of direct government goods and services.
However, the FTAA Negotiating Group appears to go much further
and open up all government contracts, services and goods to
competitive bidding from other FTAA countries' corporations.
The Negotiating Group has requested an inventory of the relevant
international classification systems and a compilation of
each government's procurement statistics.
BACK TO TOP
4. Market Access
The mandate of the Negotiating Group on Market Access is to
select a methodology and timetable for the elimination of
all remaining tariffs and "non-tariff" barriers
and agree upon the pace of tariff reduction. Tariffs are border
taxes; under both NAFTA and the WTO, they have largely been
eliminated in Canada and the Americas. Non-tariff barriers
are all the rules, policies and practices of governments,
other than tariffs, that can impact on trade. Non-tariff barriers
can potentially include everything governments do, including
delivering services and protecting the health and safety of
their citizens. Their inclusion in the mandate of this Negotiating
Group expands the scope of NAFTA market access provisions
considerably. These provisions are expanded in another important
way. Under NAFTA, market access is subject to national treatment.
This means that imported goods coming into a country from
another NAFTA country must be treated "no less favourably"
than domestic goods. But national treatment in NAFTA did not
extend to government procurement or to domestic subsidies
and was applied to services only in a limited way. This protected
most government programs from national treatment challenge.
Under the proposed FTAA rules, however, it appears that services
will be covered more fully by the market access rules. As
well, government procurement restrictions that allow governments
to protect local providers will be more open to challenge
from an expanded mandate of the government procurement provisions.
And the ability of foreign for-profit service corporations
to use the national treatment provision to challenge government
services monopolies will be greatly expanded under a proposed
new agreement on services.
Further, the Negotiating Group on Market Access has also been
charged with identifying and eliminating any unnecessary "technical
barriers to trade" in line with the WTO. The WTO Technical
Barriers to Trade (TBT) Agreement is an international regime
to harmonize environmental and other standards which effectively
creates a ceiling but no floor for such regulation. Under
its rules, a nation must be prepared to prove, if challenged,
that its environmental and safety standards are both "necessary"
and the "least trade restrictive" way to achieve
the desired conservation goals, food safety or health standard.
This means that a country bears the burden of proving a negative
- that no other measure consistent with the WTO is reasonably
available to protect environmental concerns. The WTO TBT Agreement
also sets out an onerous procedural code for establishing
new laws and regulations so arduous that it is very difficult
for any nation to meet. While there are provisions in NAFTA
on technical standards, they are not as stringent as those
found in the WTO TBT Agreement. NAFTA does require that technical
barriers not constitute "an unnecessary obstacle to trade."
However, NAFTA acknowledges the right of all parties to maintain
standards and regulatory measures that result in a higher
level of protection than would be achieved by measures based
on international standards as long as they apply these standards
in a way that does not discriminate between national and domestic
goods. By choosing the stronger provisions of the WTO, FTAA
negotiators have introduced tougher restrictions on the governments
of the Americas and their right to regulate in the best interests
of their citizens.
5. Agriculture
The mandate of the Negotiating Group on Agriculture is to
eliminate agricultural export subsidies affecting trade in
the hemisphere, based on the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture
(AOA); "discipline" other trade-distorting agricultural
practices; and ensure that "sanitary and phytosanitary
measures" are not used as a disguised restriction to
trade, using the WTO agreement as a model. The FTAA's AOA
agriculture provisions set rules on the trade in food and
restrict domestic agriculture policy, down to the level of
support for farmers, the ability to maintain emergency food
stocks, set food safety rules and ensure food supply. The
WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary
Standards (SPS) sets constraints on government policies relating
to food safety and animal and plant health, from pesticides
and biological contaminants to food inspection, product labelling
and genetically engineered foods. As with TBTs, the WTO SPS
Agreement goes further than NAFTA. The NAFTA provisions do
not in themselves impose any specific standards; they set
out a general approach to ensure that SPS measures are used
for genuine scientific reasons, not as disguised barriers
to trade. Member countries are still allowed to take SPS measures
to protect human, animal or plant life and health at the level
they consider "appropriate." While NAFTA "encourages"
the parties to harmonize their measures based on relevant
international standards, the WTO seeks to remove decisions
regarding health, food and safety from national governments
and delegate them to international standard-setting bodies
such as the Codex Alimentarius, an elite club of scientists
located in Geneva, largely controlled by the big food and
agribusiness corporations. The WTO SPS Agreement has been
used to defeat the use of the "precautionary principle,"
which it held not to be a justifiable basis upon which to
establish regulatory controls. (The precautionary principle
allows regulatory action when there is risk of harm, even
if there remains scientific uncertainty about the extent and
nature of the potential impacts of a product or practice.)
By choosing the WTO SPS Agreement over the NAFTA SPS provisions,
the drafters of the FTAA are moving to totally remove the
right of individual governments of the Americas to set standards
in the crucial areas of health, food safety and the environment.
6. Intellectual Property Rights
The mandate of the Negotiating Group on Intellectual Property
Rights is "to reduce distortions in trade in the Hemisphere
and promote and ensure adequate and effective protection to
intellectual property rights." Intellectual property
refers to types of intangible property such as patents which
generally grant their holders an exclusive power. Trade rules
on intellectual property extend this exclusive right, often
held by corporations, to the other signatory countries to
the agreement.
As of January 1, 2000, all FTAA countries are now subject
to the rules of the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects
of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). This agreement sets
enforceable global rules on patents, copyrights and trademark.
It has gone far beyond its initial scope of protecting original
inventions or cultural products and now permits the practice
of patenting plants and animal forms as well as seeds. It
promotes the private rights of corporations over local communities
and their genetic heritage and traditional medicines. It allows
transnational pharmaceutical corporations to keep drug prices
high; recently TRIPS has been invoked to stop developing countries
from providing generic, cheaper drugs to AIDS patients in
the Third World.
The FTAA Negotiating Group on Intelle ctual Property has speculated
that it might go beyond the WTO TRIPS Agreement in certain
unspecified areas. Certainly, through the additional powers
of Chapter 11, the investor-state clause, intellectual property
rights in the FTAA will have the additional enforcement powers
of cash fines and harsh penalties.
7. Subsidies, Anti-dumping and Countervailing Duties
The mandate of the Negotiating Group on Subsidies, Anti-dumping
and Countervailing Duties is to "examine ways to deepen
existing disciplines provided in the WTO Agreement on Subsidies
and Countervailing Measures and . . . to achieve a common
understanding with a view to improving, where possible, the
rules and procedures regarding the operation and application
of trade remedy laws in order not to create unjustified barriers
to trade in the Hemisphere."
The WTO Agreement sets limits on what governments may and
may not subsidize. It has been strongly criticized by many
developing countries as favouring northern countries and large
agribusiness concerns. As well, Article XXI of the GATT exempts
activities in the military sphere, including massive government
research and export subsidies, in order to protect governments'
"essential security interests." Because the security
exemption shields the war industry from WTO challenge, it
spurs government spending on the military and any industry
related to national security. Since the majority of global
military spending is concentrated in the economies of a few
northern countries, the WTO security exemption gives these
countries an enormous competitive edge over other, smaller
countries.
8. Competition Policy
The mandate of the Negotiating Group on Competition Policy
is to "guarantee that the benefits of the FTAA liberalization
process not be undermined by anti-competitive business practices."
The Negotiating Group has agreed to "advance toward the
establishment of juridical and institutional coverage at the
national, sub-regional or regional level, that proscribes
the carrying out of anti-competitive business practices"
and "to develop mechanisms that facilitate and promote
the development of competition policy and guaranteett the
enforcement of regulations on free competition among and within
thetttcountries of the Hemisphere."
Basically, the goal of competition policy, relatively new
to trade negotiations, is to reduce or eliminate practices
that appear to protect domestic monopolies. Canada is proposing
that each country adopt measures and "take appropriate
action" to "proscribe anti-competitive business
conduct." Ostensibly, the aim is to promote competition,
but the result, particularly for developing countries, is
that they are often forced to break up their existing monopolies,
only to find that they have given foreign-based transnational
corporations golden opportunities to come in and pick off
the smaller domestic companies and establish a whole new monopoly
protected by WTO agreements such as the TRIPS and the Financial
Services Agreement, both of which protect global mega-mergers.
9. Dispute Settlement
The mandate of the Negotiating Group on Dispute Settlement
is "to establish a fair, trans_parent and effective mechanism
for dispute settlement amongt FTAA countries" and to
"design ways to facilitate and promote the use of arbitration
and other alternative dispute settlement mechanisms, to solve
private trade controversies in the framework of the FTAA."
It is yet to be seen whether the FTAA dispute settlement mechanism
will mirror the NAFTA model or the WTO model. However, the
Negotiating Group's mandate includes "taking into account
inter alia the WTO Understanding ont Rules and Procedures
Governing the Settlement of Disputes." If this is the
case, then the FTAA dispute settlement system between governments
is more likely to resemble the more punitive system of the
WTO than the NAFTA. Under NAFTA, a country that loses a case
before a dispute resolution panel must either accept the ruling
and offer "appropriate compensation" to the other
government or risk retaliation of "equivalent benefits."
NAFTA does not create a common set of trade laws for the member
countries. NAFTA dispute panels rule on the basis of the domestic
trade laws of the importing country.
The role of a WTO dispute panel, however, is to decide whether
a country's disputed practice or policy is a "barrier
to trade," and to overturn the offending practice or
policy if it is deemed to be. Under the WTO Dispute Settlement
Body, a country, often acting on behalf of its own corporate
interests, can challenge the actual laws, policies and programs
of another country and strike down its domestic laws. A losing
country has three choices: change its law to conform to the
WTO ruling; pay permanent cash compensation to the winning
country; or face harsh, permanent trade sanctions from the
winning country. Dozens of nation-state health, food safety
and environmental laws have been struck down through this
WTO process. Needless to say, the rulings affect poor countries
differently than wealthy ones. Sanctions against a country
that depends on one or two export crops for survival can be
devastating. It is little surprise that the majority of WTO
challenges have come from wealthy countries. In fact, the
United States initiated almost half of the 117 WTO challenges
launched between 1995 and 2000.
Of course, the recourse to private "investors" (i.e.,
corporations) in NAFTA's Chapter 11 does not exist in the
WTO. It would appear that the FTAA negotiators will choose
to retain the powers of private dispute settlements contained
in the investor-to-state provisions of NAFTA, while opting
for the more stringent conditions of the WTO to settle state-to-state
disputes. This would be in keeping with the other proposals
for the FTAA; whichever existing (or even proposed) model
has the strongest "disciplines" is the model of
choice for the FTAA.
The three non-negotiating committees have also been meeting.
The Committee on Small Economies has "recognized the
asymmetries" between the different countries of the Americas
and the need to come up with a plan "in order to create
the opportunities for the full participation of the smaller
economies and to increase their level of development."
However, the plan appears vague, consisting mostly of providing
"a database of technical assistance needs of smaller
economies." Nowhere in this committee's mandate is there
an acknowledgement of the enormous disparity between the wealthy
and the poor of the hemisphere, both between and within countries.
The Committee on Civil Society acknowledges that "civil
society has emerged as a new actor in the trade dialogue."
Although its mandate is "to receive inputs from civil
society, to analyze them and to present the range of views
to the FTAA Trade Ministers," the purpose of any dialogue
is "to maintain transparency in the negotiating process
and to conduct the negotiations in such a manner as to broaden
public understanding and support for the FTAA."
It appears that the Committee's real role is not to listen,
but to keep up the appearance of real dialogue. In fact, says
Stephenson, the benefit of this Committee's work "may
diffuse pressures related to issues of labour and the environment."
The Joint Government-Private Sector Committee of Experts on
Electronic Commerce, on the other hand, is a very important
committee whose subject has all the hallmarks of an emerging
sector. Electronic commerce has exploded in recent years.
United States E-commerce sales were close to $30 billion (US)
in 2000, up 75 percent in one year, and may account for one
quarter of world trade by 2005, the year the FTAA is to be
ratified. The U.S. has identified a goal of adopting worldwide
rules for a global non-regulatory, market-oriented E-commerce
regime. Many billions of dollars every year could be lost
if taxes are removed from this kind of trade, leaving governments
with even more reduced funding bases for government programs.
The committee, heavily dominated by the most powerful corporate
producers of Internet hardware, software and communications
equipment, such as Microsoft and AT& T, has already carried
out extensive analyses of E-commerce issues and is exchanging
views with other organizations such as the WTO and the OECD.
It has mandated several key studies on all aspects of trade
and E-commerce, and is clearly a growing powerhouse within
the FTAA family.
Finally, the FTAA Trade Negotiations Committee has identified
three areas for "early harvest agreements" - on
forestry, energy and fisheries - which it hopes will be agreed
upon at the April 2001 Ministerial Summit in Quebec City.
This means that, in these areas, agreement could be reached
before the 2005 deadline for full FTAA ratification to remove
tariffs from these environmentally sensitive resources, with
no opportunity for public input.
What Is Canada's Position on the FTAA?
Canada has taken a leading role in the FTAA process (as it
has in the MAI, the WTO and the GATS). The Canadian government
has become an enthusiastic champion of NAFTA and its expansion,
and has been pursuing individual free trade and investment
agreements with Latin American countries like Chile, El Salvador,
Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Canada chaired the initial
18-month phase of the FTAA negotiations set up in Santiago
in April 1998, and is on record in its support of extending
a model of deregulated trade and privatization to Latin America.
At a March 1999 meeting of the Standing Committee on International
Trade, George Haynal, Assistant Deputy Minister, Americas,
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAIT), said: "The
hemisphere has gotten its act together. It has some way to
go, but our engagement is with an area that is ready to engage
us on our terms." Added Bob Anderson, Vice-President,
Americas, Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA):
"Virtually all of the countries have bought into the
Washington Consensus in some form or other. That Washington
Consensus implies a whole series of sequenced reforms. What
we in CIDA have tried to do is identify those kinds of reforms
where Canada has some particular expertise, some comparative
advantage." DFAIT has been strongly criticized by civil
society, labour, human rights and other non-governmental organizations
for its past lack of consultations with any groups but business.
For instance, when citizens groups in Canada heard about the
MAI in late 1996, they were told by DFAIT that no such treaty
existed. After they got a hold of a copy of the text in March
of 1997, the groups acquired a list of government MAI consultations;
it showed that DFAIT had been meeting with the Canadian Chamber
of Commerce and the Canadian Council on International Issues
- the international arm of the BCNI - as early as 1993, four
years before the government later admitted it was even involved
in such negotiations. So on December 13, 2000, when DFAIT
announced that it was releasing the government's negotiating
position on the FTAA, calling it an unprecedented act of transparency,
many groups were very pleased. At last, a meaningful consultation
could begin. However, so much is missing from this document
that, only months before the Quebec City meeting, it is impossible
to gauge Canada's position on the most contentious of the
issues. Four areas - investment, services, dispute settlement
and intellectual property rights - are missing altogether,
and many questions remain in a number of other key sectors.
Areas of Concern
* Investment
The Government of Canada says that it has made no submissions
to the Negotiating Group on Investment to date. This is hard
to believe. Canada was chairing the process during the period
that the Negotiating Group on Investment came up with its
mandate and spelled out a very ambitious position on investment
(set out in detail above) that includes national treatment,
services and investor-state compensation provisions. As well,
in its introduction to its published negotiating position,
DFAIT states its clear support for an investment agreement
in the FTAA: "In recognizing that investment is the main
engine for growth, Leaders further committed themselves to
creating strengthened mechanisms that promote and protect
the flow of productive investment in the Hemisphere."
Then, in its own draft Preamble, DFAIT calls for all governments
to commit to "establishing a fair and predictable framework
for promoting and protecting investment." International
Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew has said that he will not
sign the FTAA if it contains the investor-state clause (Chapter
11) of NAFTA. This appears to be in direct contradiction to
the commitments that have been made by his department's negotiators.
There is an urgent need for the government to clarify its
exact position on investment immediately.
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* Services
Similarly, DFAIT says it has made no submissions to the Negotiating
Group on Services either. Again, Canada was chairing the hemispheric
Negotiating Group that came up with the sweeping definitions
of services, including national treatment, universal coverage
and extended market access. It is clear from the introduction
to Canada's position that the Canadian government looks favourably
on including services in the FTAA: "Specifically, they
(the Leaders) noted that the elimination of impediments to
market access for goods and services among our countries will
foster collective economic growth." In the draft Preamble,
Canada calls for "enhancing market access for trade in
goods and services" and acknowledges "the importance
of regulatory reform to advancing trade liberalization."
Certainly, if Canada takes a position at the FTAA similar
to its position at the GATS, it will be promoting negotiations
in which, as the government's own WTO position paper states,
"nothing is off the table, a priori, including the politically
sensitive areas of health and education." To see what
Canada is likely to support, we can look to the existing GATS
agreement as well as the proposed additions. The GATS currently
covers all service sectors and modes of supply as well as
most government measures, including laws, practices, regulations
and guidelines - written and unwritten. No government measure
that affects trade in services, whatever its aim, even for
environmental or consumer protection, for universal coverage
or to enforce labour standards, is beyond the scope of the
GATS. Essentially, the agreement prohibits discrimination
against a foreign supplier in all covered areas notwithstanding
the conditions under which services are provided and regardless
of the human rights or environmental record of the provider.
Parties have also agreed that some rules apply "horizontally"
or across the board, whether or not the area has already been
listed with the GATS. One "horizontal" rule is that
all regulations in any given sector, including social services,
must be "Least Trade Restrictive" and all member
WTO countries must be prepared to include market mechanisms
wherever possible, even in social programs. At present, public
services provided by government are technically applicable
for exemptions. Hence, some countries have claimed exemptions
for their publicly funded social security programs. But under
GATS articlet 1.3C, for a service to be considered to be under
government authority, it must be provided "entirely free."
That means that the sector in question must be completely
financed by government and have no commercial purpose. All
government services supplied on a commercial basis - even
if it is not-for-profit - are subject to GATS rules, as are
government services publicly supplied but in competition with
commercial suppliers. Since hardly any service sector in the
world is entirely commercial-free, this exemption is increasingly
meaningless. In the new round of negotiations, GATS officials
will attempt to expand access to domestic markets and governments
will be under great pressure to list more of their services
and exempt fewer. The powerful northern countries will be
pressing for more binding market access provisions, pressing
developing countries for guaranteed, irreversible access to
their markets and eliminating many more policy options. As
well, GATS officials are seeking to place severe restraints
on domestic regulations, thereby limiting governments' ability
to enact environmental, health and other standards that hinder
free trade. Article VI:4 calls for the development of any
"necessary disciplines" to ensure that "measures
relating to qualification requirements and procedures, technical
standards and licensing requirements do not constitute unnecessary
barriers to trade." This provision would also apply horizontally.
Governments would be compelled to demonstrate that regulations,
standards and laws were "necessary" to achieve a
WTO-sanctioned objective, and that no less commercially restrictive
alternative was available. Further, the new talks are aimed
at developing new GATS rules and restrictions, intended to
further restrict the use of government subsidies, such as
those used in public works, municipal services and social
programs. A particularly threatening development is the demand
for an expansion of the "Commercial Presence" rules.
Commercial Presence allows an "investor" of one
GATS country to establish a presence in any other GATS country
and compete not only for business against domestic suppliers
but for public funds against domestic publicly funded institutions
and services. All of this is taking place under Canada's leadership;
Canada's WTO Ambassador, Sergio Marchi, is chairing the WTO
GATS negotiations. There is no reason to believe that the
Government of Canada would take a substantively different
position on services in the FTAA.
* Intellectual Property Rights and Dispute Settlement
Again, the absence of Canada's position on these two crucial
areas from the document is very disturbing. As with services
and investment, Canada was in the chair during the negotiations
that led to the proposed mandate outlined above. The notion
that the Canadian government is not in full compliance with
the Negotiating Group on Intellectual Property Rights and
the Negotiating Group on Dispute Settlement is not credible.
* Technical Barriers to Trade Canada is proposing a new and
separate chapter on the subject of Technical Barriers to Trade
(TBTs) based on the TBT provisions of the WTO. (These are
the rules that state a nation must be prepared to prove, if
challenged, that its environmental and safety standards are
both "necessary" and the "least trade restrictive"
way to achieve the desired conservation goals, food safety
or health standard.) These rules are of great concern to Canadian
environmentalists and groups concerned with food and animal
safety, as they have been used to strike down health and safety
regulations around the world. DFAIT says there is a need for
a "broader framework" of discussion and commitment
than exists in the proposed FTAA and recommends establishing
a new Committee on TBTs which would meet regularly and provide
technical assistance to the developing countries of the Americas
in order to assist them to deregulate "unjustified use
of government regulatory powers that have an undue (more restrictive
than necessary) or discriminatory impact on trade."t
Canada's Preambular language expressing its hope of finding
ways to "better protect the environment" is negated
by the strong anti-environmental language of its position
on TBTs. * Agriculture The Government of Canada is a hawk
on the issue of agriculture. It is calling for the total elimination
of export subsidies for agricultural products "as quickly
as possible" and to prevent their re-introduction "in
any form." It is also calling for the "maximum possible
reduction or elimination of production and trade-distorting
domestic support," even though the elimination of farm
subsidies has had a devastating impact on Canadians farmers,
and it wants to "accelerate the elimination of tariffs
for originating agricultural products." It is bullish
on non-tariff measures and regulations, calling for a zero-tolerance
policy on restrictions on imports. DFAIT also strongly endorses
the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary
Measures (SPS) in the FTAA. (The WTO Agreement on SPS sets
constraints on government policies relating to food safety
and animal and plant health, from pesticides and biological
contaminants to food inspection, product labelling and genetically
engineered foods.) Like TBTs, these rules are seen by many
as a way to reduce or eliminate government regulations that
protect human and animal health in favour of private interests.
As with TBTs, the Government of Canada wants to "facilitate"
day-to-day SPS activities within the hemisphere and proposes
the establishment of a "Consultative Group on SPS"
to provide a "regular forum for consultations, problem-solving
and institutional cooperation." The committee would look
at harmonization, risk assessment and transparency, among
other things. Canada's strong leadership on this form of deregulation,
particularly in light of the deteriorating environment of
the countries of the hemisphere, as well as the lowered standards
resulting from giant corporate farms, is great cause for concern.
* Government Procurement
The Government of Canada is also a hawk on the issue of government
procurement in the FTAA, calling for full transparency and
the publication of all laws, regulations, judicial decisions
and administrative rulings to do with government procurement.
"Canada agrees that making public the rules and administrative
measures related to doing business with a government is an
important aspect of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas."
But DFAIT goes further, calling for a prohibition of "any
type" of offset. Offsets, DFAIT explains, are "measures
imposed or considered by an entity prior to or in the course
of its procurement process that encourage local development
or improve its balance of payments accounts by means of domestic
content, licensing of technology, investment, country-trade
or similar requirements." In other words, DFAIT supports
the elimination of all the ways in which governments ensure
that foreign investment return some local good to a community
in return for the profit transnational corporations gain from
such access. If Canada followed this formula proposed by DFAIT,
all sorts of affirmative action, community investment and
local hiring programs would have tot bet eliminated when dealing
with foreign-based transnational corporations.
* Competition
Canada is calling for very strong language around competition
policy in the FTAA "to ensure that the benefits of the
FTAA liberalization process are not undermined by anti-competitive
business practices." However, DFAIT is strangely mute
on the question of "official monopolies and state enterprises."
Its hawkish position on government procurement coupled with
its strong position on competition, as well as its ap_parent
pro-services bias, may put Canadian public institutions, such
as the CBC, in jeopardy. What Impact Will the FTAA Have on
Canadians? Social Security The expanded powers proposed for
the FTAA in combination with Chapter 11 of NAFTA and the introduction
of "universal coverage of all service sectors" pose
a grave threat to Canada's social programs. Universal health
care, public education, child care, pensions, social assistance
and many other social services are now delivered by governments
on a not-for-profit basis. Until the recent GATS negotiations,
and now the FTAA negotiations, Canada has always maintained
that these social programs were a fundamental right of citizenship
for all Canadians, and have exempted them from trade agreements.
However, with these two agreements, the Canadian government
is opening up itself, and every other level of government,
to trade-sanctioned threats by transnational service corporations
keen to break down the existingt government monopolies in
the hemisphere. Services is the fastest growing sector in
international trade, and of all services, health, education
and water are shaping up to be the most potentially lucrative
of all. Global expenditures on water services now exceed $1
trillion every year; on education, they exceed $2 trillion;
and on health care, expenditures exceed $3.5 trillion. In
Canada, the service sector accounts for 75 percent of all
jobs. These and other services have been targeted by predatory
and powerful entrepreneurial transnational corporations that
are aiming at nothing less than the complete dismantling of
public services by subjecting them to the rules of international
competition and the discipline of the WTO and the FTAA. (Already
over 40 countries, including all of Europe, have listed education
with the GATS, opening up their public education sectors to
foreign-based corporate competition, and almost 100 countries
have done the same in health care.) In the United States,
health care has become a huge business, and giant health care
corporations are registered on the New York Stock Exchange.
Rick Scott, the president of Columbia, the world's largest
for-profit hospital corporation, says that health care is
a business, no different from the airline or ball-bearing
industry, and he has vowed to destroy every public hospital
in North America, as they are not "good corporate citizens."
Investment houses like Merrill Lynch and The Lehman Brothers
predict that public education will be privatized in the hemisphere
over the next decade the way public health has been, and say
there is an untold amount of profit to be made when this happens.
If services are included in the FTAA, as they so clearly appear
to be, foreign for-profit health, education and other social
service corporations from anywhere in the hemisphere will
have the right to establish a "commercial presence"
anywhere in Canada. They will have the right to compete for
public dollars with public institutions like hospitals, schools
and day care centres. Standards for health, education, child
care and social work professionals will be subject to FTAA
rules and review to ensure they are not an impediment to trade.
Degree-granting authority will be given to all hemispheric-based
education corporations. Foreign-based telemedicine services
will become legal in Canada. And Canada won't be able to stop
the transborder competition of low-cost health and education
professionals. If any government at any level in Canada attempts
to resist these developments and tries to maintain these services
in domestic control, every service corporation of the hemisphere
will have the legal right to sue for financial compensation
for lost revenues under the investor-state provisions of the
FTAA. This is not speculation; in areas covered by the current
NAFTA, there have now been many precedents of governments
reversing decisions and paying onerous compensation packages
to private interests affected by public policy. As well, there
is already a disturbing precedent in health care under the
existing investment provisions of NAFTA. A March 2000 legal
opinion by Canadian trade expert Steven Shrybman shows that
when Alberta passed Bill 11, which permits for-profit corporations
to compete with public hospitals for public funding to provide
health care "services," it gave trade-sanctioned
rights to U.S. for-profit foreign corporations to set up shop
not only in Alberta, but in any province in Canada and to
sue for compensation if denied this access. "While in
theory a government could retreat from contracting out health
services to private companies, that government would face
the full force of foreign investor compensation claims for
not just present, but future losses. The costs of compensation
resulting from re-establishing a public system would be prohibitive."
The reality is simple: once privatization is established in
any public sector, it would be almost impossible to reverse.
With time, Canadian governments would no longer be able to
afford to publicly fund health care, social security programs
and education as they would have to be prepared to give equal
access to such funding to private contractors from the other
FTAA countries. Canadians have already seen a steady erosion
of their social security under the new rules of economic globalization
and trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO, as Canada's economy
has merged into the American orbit and American rules. Socially,
Canada now looks more like the U.S. than in any time in its
history, with its huge gaps between haves and have-nots. In
Canada, as in the U.S., while great prosperity abounds in
some quarters, great poverty is growing in others. In fact,
Canada has experienced the highest rise in child poverty in
the industrialized world in the last decade - the same years
in which the number of millionaires has tripled and corporate
salaries have grown at an average of about 15 percent a year.
In the very free trade years that corporate salaries skyrocketed,
workers' wages rose just 2 percent, less than the rate of
inflation. The cuts to social programs and Employment Insurance
(only one third of unemployed workers now receive EI benefits
they have paid for, compared to almost 80 percent in 1989)
have been so deep that Standard and Poor says that the myth
of a "kinder Canada" must be put to rest. For the
first time in 1999, says the New York-based ratings institute,
Canada spent less on itst elderly and unemployed than did
the United States. With the proposed FTAA, the assault on
social security will dramatically escalate. Environment The
FTAA draft, as it now stands, contains no safeguards for the
environment. The original mandate for the FTAA, drawn up at
the first Summit of the Americas in Miami in 1994, contained
a promise to promote economic integration of the hemisphere
in such a way as "to guarantee sustainable development
while protecting the environment." A major Summit on
Sustainable Development was held in Bolivia in 1996 in order
to ensure that the principles of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit
would be integral to the FTAA process. Out of that meeting
(at which civil society groups and environmentalists were
notably absent), came 65 initiatives know as the "Santa
Cruz Action Plan," and a new body, the OAS Inter-American
Committee on Sustainable Development. However, the whole process
was badly underfunded and had no clear mandate for action;
it has been widely regarded as a failure. As a consequence,
the whole goal of sustainable development was completely dropped
from the FTAA's new mandate at the Santiago Summit in 1998,
and the tracks of trade and environment were completely separated.
With George W. Bush now in the White House, it is even more
certain that environmental concerns about the hemispheric
free trade deal will be set aside. The Canadian government's
recently published "position paper" on the FTAA
contains a reference to the environment in its proposed Preamble.
It calls for the FTAA to commit to "Better protecting
the environment and promoting sustainable development by adopting
trade and environmental policies that are mutually supportive."
However, Preambular language in trade agreements is non-binding
and unenforceable, so any promise in this section of the agreement
is fairly meaningless. In any case, it is not possible to
find compatibility between a trade agreement that contains
investor-state rights for corporations and environmental stewardship.
continued in Part II,
"Chapter 11"
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