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North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
New Report! NAFTA Chapter 11 Investor-State Cases: Lessons for the Central American Free Trade Agreement
Another Americas is Possible:The Impact of NAFTA on the U.S. Latino Community and Lessons for Future Trade Agreements
Department of Labor Certified Trade-Related Job Loss
January 1, 2004 marks the tenth anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement’s implementation. NAFTA promoters - including many of the world’s largest corporations - promised it would create hundreds of thousands of new high-wage U.S. jobs, raise living standards in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, improve environmental conditions and transform Mexico from a poor developing country into a booming new market for U.S. exports. NAFTA opponents - including labor, environmental, consumer and religious groups - argued that NAFTA would launch a race-to-the-bottom in wages, destroy hundreds of thousands of good U.S. jobs, undermine democratic control of domestic policy-making and threaten health, environmental and food safety standards.Why such divergent views? NAFTA was a radical experiment - never before had a merger of three nations with such radically different levels of development been attempted. Plus, until NAFTA “trade” agreements only dealt with cutting tariffs and lifting quotas to set the terms of trade in goods between countries. But NAFTA contained 900 pages of one-size-fits-all rules to which each nation was required to conform all of its domestic laws - regardless of whether voters and their democratically-elected representatives had previously rejected the very same policies in Congress, state legislatures or city councils. NAFTA required limits on the safety and inspection of meat sold in our grocery stores; new patent rules that raised medicine prices; constraints on your local government’s ability to zone against sprawl or toxic industries; and elimination of preferences for spending your tax dollars on U.S.-made products or locally-grown food. In fact, calling NAFTA a “trade” agreement is misleading, NAFTA is really an investment agreement. Its core provisions grant foreign investors a remarkable set of new rights and privileges that promote relocation abroad of factories and jobs and the privatization and deregulation of essential services, such as water, energy and health care.Remarkably, many of NAFTA’s most passionate boosters in Congress and among economists never read the agreement. They made their pie-in-the-sky promises of NAFTA benefits based on trade theory and ideological prejudice for anything with the term “free trade” attached to it. Now, ten years later, the time for conjecture and promises is over: the data are in and they clearly show the damage NAFTA has wrought for millions of people in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Thankfully, the failed NAFTA model - a watered down version of which is also contained in the World Trade Organization (WTO) - is merely one among many options. Throughout the world, people suffering with the consequences of this disastrous experiment are organizing to demand the better world we know is possible. But, we face a race against time. The same interests who got us into NAFTA are now pushing to expand it and lock in 31 more countries in Latin American and the Caribbean through the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and five Central American countries through a Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).
» The World Bank on NAFTA: Wrong Numbers Lead to Wrong Conclusion
» The Ten Year Track Record of NAFTA: Agriculture
» The Ten Year Track Record of NAFTA: Democracy
» The Ten Year Traack Record of NAFTA: Mexico
» The Ten Year Track Record of NAFTA: Jobs


Free Trade Area of the Americashttp://www.citizen.org/trade/ftaa/

Public Citizen | FTAA - Free Trade Area of the Americas - Free Trade Area of the Americas
Click here to see photos from the IV Summit of the Americas in Mar del Plata, Argentina (Nov. 4-5)
The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), currently being negotiated by 34 countries of the Americas, is intended 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.

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

New Report! NAFTA Chapter 11 Investor-State Cases: Lessons for the Central American Free Trade Agreement
Another Americas is Possible: The Impact of NAFTA on the U.S. Latino Community and Lessons for Future Trade Agreements
Department of Labor Certified Trade-Related Job Loss

Stop the Peru NAFTA Expansion!
Call Congress about the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement Today!
Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador FTAs: NAFTA Expansion to the Amazon
.The Bush administration notified Congress of its intent to negotiate a trade agreement with the South American countries of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia in November of 2003. The idea was to create an Andean Free Trade Agreement (AFTA). Like CAFTA, AFTA would be a piece in the FTAA jigsaw puzzle and is based on the same failed neo-liberal NAFTA model, which has caused the "race to the bottom" in labor and environmental standards and promotes privatization and deregulation of key public services.

Because of their large territories of bio-diverse Amazon tropical rainforest, as well as long history of violence and unrest, the countries involved in the AFTA negotiations provide unique challenges to trade negotiators, and the mistaken application of the one-size fits all NAFTA model of trade in the region could have devastating consequences.In December of 2005, as other countries tried to drive a harder bargain, the U.S. and Peru reached a deal that could end up as the framework for an AFTA agreement, though the agreement between the two countries will likely come before the U.S. Congress for a vote as a bilateral U.S. – Peru “free trade” agreement before the end of the year.Read the Partial Text of the U.S.-Peru “Free Trade” agreementUnfortunately, the U.S.-Peru agreement text is the exact same failed NAFTA and CAFTA model – guaranteed to cost more good paying jobs, bankrupt more farmers and give more power to corporations to use international trade tribunals to attack U.S. sovereignty.
Fact Sheet: What You Need to Know about the Peru FTA
Citizens Trade Campaign Archive on U.S.-Peru and AFTA
Information and Resources on AFTA in Spanish
The people of Peru don’t want this agreement. In April of 2006, the National Electoral Council of Peru certified nearly 60,000 signatures submitted by anti-FTA coalitions to request a referendum on the deal. But after June elections resulted in a majority for parties that had been critical of the FTA during the heated campaign, the lame-duck (post-election, but pre-new congressional term) Peruvian Congress resolved to ignore the petition for a referendum and then, despite broad calls for it to be considered by the new Congress, the lame-duck session approved the FTA.Now, both Peruvian and U.S. civil society organizations are looking to the U.S. Congress – the last chance to stop this misguided trade deal.TAKE ACTION: COME JOIN US for a Lobby Day to Stop the Peru NAFTA Expansion on November 15th, 2006 in Washington, D.C.!Meanwhile, as the U.S. - Colombia "free trade" agreement has also been finalized and Congress has been notified of the Bush Administration's intention to sign the agreement, concerns about labor rights, security issues, and social and environmental costs have been amplified even further.Read the Partial Text of the U.S.-Colombia “Free Trade” AgreementNegotiations with Ecuador and Bolivia continue to be on ice, though there are elite interests in both of these countries that would like to restart the talks. The letter from Congressional Democrats to the U.S. Trade Representative sent in November 2005 highlights some of the most critical security, labor rights and public health concerns about AFTA – all of which are pertinent both to the Peru and Colombia “free trade” agreements.After the painful 1-vote margin on the CAFTA vote last July, if we speak up loudly now, we can assure that the U.S.-Peru agreement and all of the AFTA deals are sent back to the drawing board.
TAKE ACTION: Call Today to Tell Congress to Oppose the U.S.-Peru Deal!
Is your state bound to the procurement rules in AFTA?
Find out more about your state's commitments to international trade agreements.»
LULAC Resolution Calling on the U.S. Congress to Reject New Trade Agreements with Peru and Colombia
» Cusco Declaration: Towards the Construction of Pluri-National States and Intercultural Societies
» Letter from 24 Members of Congress to USTR about the Andean FTA
» Environmental Groups Strongly Oppose the U.S.-Peru FTA
» Interfaith Working Group on Trade and Investment Statement of Opposition to the U.S.-Peru FTA

"NAFTA for Africa" Bill (H.R. 434)http://www.citizen.org/trade/africa/
Public Citizen | Africa - "NAFTA for Africa" Bill (H.R. 434)
The African NAFTA bill, euphemistically dubbed the "African Growth and Opportunity Act" by its boosters, was pushed in 1999 by a coalition of U.S.-based oil and other multinational corporations. NGOs in Africa and the U.S. attacked the legislation as undermining African interests in sovereign, equitable development in order to promote U.S. corporate control of African economics and natural resources. After a heated battle, the bill narrowly passed in the House 233-186 and died in the Senate. In his January 1999 State of the Union address, President Clinton announced a major White House effort to revive this legislation, calling for Congress to quickly pass the "Africa Trade and Development" bill. On May 18, 2000 the bill was passed into law by President Clinton.