Social Forum Activists Blast Bush Plan
Protesters of the Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil wave a Venezuelan flag as they demonstrate against US policies for Venezuela and Iraq at the Third World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil Saturday, Jan. 25, 2003. The forum is an annual protest against the World Economic Forum held simultaneously in Davos, Switzerland.
By STAN LEHMAN Associated Press Writer
President Bush wants to establish a free trade agreement stretching from Alaska to Argentina, but if participants at the World Social Forum have their way, he'll never pull it off.
A collection of activists ranging from poor Bolivian farmers and Ecuadorean Indians to the poverty relief group Oxfam International said Saturday that the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA, would translate into a U.S. annexation of Latin American economies.
Bush wants to form the 34-nation bloc by 2005, eliminating tariffs to create the world's largest free trade zone. Cuba would be excluded, because membership is limited to countries with democratically elected governments.
Activists at the six-day social forum, a counter-conference to the simultaneous World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, say the FTAA would mainly benefit large multinational corporations and hurt Latin American farmers who can't compete with agricultural giants based in the United States.
The Brazil forum has drawn about 100,000 participants, offering 1,700 sessions and workshops on topics ranging from corporate misdeeds to Third World debt.
One participant is Zacarias Calatayud, a Bolivian farmer in his 40s, who used to grow rice, sugarcane and potatoes on 20 acres in the country's tropical north. He was put out of business when cheap imported farm products started flooding into Boliva from Brazil and Argentina.
Those imports started in the late 1990s, when Bolivia joined the South American Mercosur trading bloc as an associated member. Now Calatayud farms just one acre, to feed his family.
"With Mercosur we're already living with a smaller FTAA," Calatayud said. "With the FTAA, we'll end up in the streets of the cities, abandoning our plots and building shacks."
Oxfam released a report Saturday criticizing the agreement, saying it favors investors but would increase Latin American poverty.
For comparison, Oxfam cited Mexico's 3 million corn farmers, who have seen the price of their product drop 50 percent since the NAFTA trade agreement with the United States and Canada went into effect.
"The poorest people of Latin America live in rural areas and they are the people who depend on agriculture," said Simon Ticehurst, Oxfam's Mexico campaign coordinator.
The trade agreement would probably be phased in over five to 10 years, meaning that Latin American farmers who never learned other skills would be displaced without jobs, said Mark Weisbrot, an economist who co-directs the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.
"The United States went from 1870 to 1970 from having 56 percent of our population in agriculture to 4.6 percent," he said. "Imagine compressing this into a five or 10-year period: It's a recipe for social explosion."
Manuel Masaquiza of Ecuador's National Indian Conference called the FTAA "the birth of a monster that will devour the poor and marginalized of Latin America."
Ecuador's Indians, already the country's poorest citizens, doubt they can compete with an anticipated flood of American products if the trade agreement goes through, Masaquiza said.
Latin America will simply turn into a cheap source of labor and a huge consumer market for U.S. goods, said Doris Trujillo, an Ecuadorean Kichwas Indian dressed in a black felt fedora-style hat and a red-and-black poncho.
"The FTAA will bankrupt farmers and small businessmen who will not be able to compete with the United States," she said.
Even an association of small U.S. farmers sent a representative to Brazil to protest the agreement.
It "is a very tangible boogeyman out to get Latin America and spread the power of capitalism and multinationals in the region," said Dena Hoff, of the Washington-based National Family Farm Coalition.
Last modified: January 25. 2003 1:27PM