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REPORTS: LATIN AMERICA |
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Saturday
20 December 2003
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Activists Predict Increase in Street
Vendors
María Isabel García
BOGOTA, (IPS) - Critics of the impact of
free trade agreements on Latin America,
especially the projected effects of the
FTAA, say the number of street vendors
will increase in the region's large
cities.
Due to the inevitable flood of U.S. farm
products, which have a competitive edge
thanks to the huge government subsidies
shelled out to U.S. farmers, ''the most
likely scenario is an increase in street
vendors'' in the big cities of Latin
America and the Caribbean, said
Salvadoran economist César Villalona.
William Rodríguez, with Nicaragua's
International Studies Centre, also
predicted an increase in rural and urban
unemployment, as well as the
disappearance of traditional forms of
production like the artisanal or manual
production of corn tortillas, ''which
will begin to be manufactured like
compact discs.''
That panorama was described by Villalona,
Rodríguez and other independent
economists and delegates of
non-governmental organisations taking
part in a Dec. 10-13 seminar on the
possible effects of the FTAA (Free Trade
Area of the Americas) and other trade
deals with the United States.
The seminar was organised by the Latin
American Institute of Alternative Legal
Services (ILSA).
The ''geographic logic'' of free trade
agreements is in line with ''the
expansionist policy'' of the United
States, Héctor Moncayo, with ILSA, told
IPS.
He said it started with the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),
which has linked the United States,
Canada and Mexico since 1994.
On Wednesday, the United States reached
a free trade agreement with four Central
American countries (Costa Rica withdrew
at the last minute).
The next step, said Moncayo, will be
efforts to negotiate agreements with the
Andean nations.
Because the United States ''is a huge
gravitational force in the continent,''
the free trade agreements that will be
most heavily promoted will be bilateral
deals with Washington, he added.
The FTAA draft agreement reached by 34
trade ministers in Miami on Nov. 20,
which was dubbed ''FTAA lite'', actually
encourages the possibility of bilateral
negotiations.
Two days before the ministerial meeting
in Miami, U.S. Trade Representative
Robert Zoellick sent a message to the
U.S. Congress announcing that President
George W. Bush wanted to start bilateral
negotiations with Colombia, Ecuador,
Peru and Bolivia.
The four countries, which along with
Venezuela make up the Andean Community,
hope to continue enjoying the trade
preferences they are granted by the U.S.
Andean Trade Promotion and Drug
Eradication Act (ATPDEA), in
compensation for their anti-drug
efforts.
Participants in the ILSA seminar pointed
to the scant benefits felt by the
majority of Latin Americans as a result
of commodity exports, and due to the
small proportion that manufactured
products represent in overall exports.
Per capita export revenues range between
1,000 and 2,000 dollars in Chile, Costa
Rica, Jamaica, Mexico, the Dominican
Republic, and Uruguay, and between 400
and 1,000 dollars in Argentina, Ecuador,
El Salvador, Honduras and Paraguay.
The lowest per capita export revenues
are found in Colombia (272 dollars) and
Brazil (250 dollars), although the low
rates are compensated by larger domestic
markets -- huge in the case of Brazil,
Latin America's giant, said the
president of the Colombian Society of
Economists, Amilkar Acosta.
The speakers said small and medium
farmers are among those hit hardest by
the negative impacts of free trade
accords.
In El Salvador, the livelihoods of more
than half a million farmers who grow
fresh produce and grains and raise
chickens and other livestock are
jeopardised, while more than nine
million dairy farmers in Central America
are at risk of losing their source of
income.
Referring to the lessons that other
Latin American nations can learn from
Chile's experience with bilateral
accords with the United States and the
European Union, Manuel Riesco, with the
Agricultural Consortium of the South, a
Chilean group, told IPS that ''the best
thing is to obtain the longest
timeframes as possible, to gain time for
the economy to adapt.''
Chile signed a free trade agreement with
the EU in November 2002 and another with
the United States in June 2003.
Riesco argued that ''it is important to
understand that the agreements that are
being negotiated will definitely be
signed. We opposed them, but we
obviously lost.''
''You don't negotiate with the United
States -- you either sign on or you
don't,'' he added.
The activist pointed to the very
different effects that the free trade
agreements have had on fruit farmers in
central Chile, an area with a Pacific
version of the Mediterranean climate,
whose products find a strong market in
North America, and on farmers in the
south.
''The experience has been bad'' for
growers of traditional crops like
cereals and grains, cooking oil
producers, and dairy and beef farmers in
five of Chile's 13 regions, he
explained.
Economist Cristian Candia, with
Consumers International (CI), said ''the
rights of consumers are absent in the
negotiations.''
CI groups 250 consumer rights
federations from 117 countries,
including virtually all consumer rights
groups in Latin America and the
Caribbean.
''The free market in and of itself does
not ensure any benefits for consumers,
even though the free trade accords claim
to do so,'' he told IPS.
''Benefits for consumers are an
afterthought, standing far behind the
rights of investors,'' he maintained.
In Candia's view, free trade treaties
''consecrate the right to invest capital
above all other economic and social
rights.''
''We are witnessing 'equal treatment'
under unequal conditions, which
generates regressive situations in the
distribution of wealth and in the sphere
of social rights, in the North as well
as the South,'' said the activist.
Moncayo said he was in favour of
''continuing to fight'' against the
conditions imposed by the free trade
agreements, and against the loss of
livelihood suffered by significant
groups of small and medium farmers
throughout the region.
He also predicted that resistance to
free trade agreements would be a central
issue and a dividing point in elections
in Central America next year.
With respect to Colombia, Moncayo said
that despite the fact that the country's
team of negotiators says their strategy
is ''to obtain the most, at the least
possible cost, the reality is that the
country's main objective is to maintain
the preferences it enjoys under the
ATPDEA.''
But the benefits are not likely to
remain in place, he said. After a
meeting with U.S. lawmakers, Colombia's
Minister of Foreign Trade, Industry and
Tourism, Jorge Botero, admitted that the
legislators told him to forget about the
ATPDEA, ''because it is going to
expire,'' and that they proposed
''starting from scratch in
negotiations'' of a bilateral treaty.
Former finance minister Juan Santos had
already warned that ''the gringo
negotiators go for the jugular vein, and
I'm speaking out of experience.''
With regards to an eventual accord
between the four Andean nations and the
United States, Santos said ''we're
talking about negotiating with the
world's superpower, which will try to
squeeze us dry, to the very last drop.''
He recommended finding a way ''to avoid
sacrificing our markets in the treaty.''
Acosta, meanwhile, warned about the
disadvantages that the FTAA and an
eventual bilateral free trade agreement
with the United States would have for
Colombia, ''unless the current economic
model is modified, because Colombia will
be condemned to serve as Uncle Sam's
mascot.''
He grimaced when recalling the joy
expressed by the Colombian delegation at
the FTAA ministerial meeting in Miami.
''Remember that in the times of the
Roman empire, the gladiators sent in to
fight would stand before the emperor and
say ''Hail, Caesar! Those who are about
to die salute you!''
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