The FTAA's Threat to Water

What is the FTAA?

At the 1994 Summit of the Americas in Miami, Florida, the leaders of the 34 nations of Canada, the United States, Central and South America and the Caribbean (excluding Cuba), agreed to sign a hemisphere-wide trade and investment pact called the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). At this meeting, former President Bill Clinton pledged to fulfill former President George Bush's dream of a trade agreement stretching from Anchorage to Tierra del Fuego. As envisioned, the FTAA would be the largest free trade zone in the world, as well as the most far-reaching trade and investment agreement ever signed. Newly elected President George W. Bush has committed to carry out his father’s dream. The FTAA is scheduled for completion in 2005.

The FTAA negotiations were officially launched in Santiago, Chile, in September 1998. At this meeting, negotiators agreed to model the FTAA on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed in 1994 by the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and the World Trade Organization (WTO) -- a trade liberalization organization with over 135 member countries established in 1995. Based on the NAFTA and WTO models, the FTAA goes far beyond these agreements in both scope and power.

For example, the FTAA, as it now stands, would introduce into the Western Hemisphere all of the disciplines of the proposed services agreement of the WTO -— General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) -— with the powers of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) that was rejected by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1998, to create a new trade powerhouse with sweeping new authority over every aspect of life in the region. The FTAA also locks in and expands upon the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed on most of the countries of the region by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

Early on, citizens demanded that working groups on democratic governance, labor and human rights, consumer safety and the environment be included in the FTAA negotiations. This demand was rejected, and instead a Committee of Government Representatives on Civil Society was established, but with no mechanisms to incorporate civil society concerns and suggestions into the negotiations. At the same time, the business community was enjoying unprecedented direct involvement in the negotiating process through the American Business Forum. The result has been that corporate concerns dominate the negotiations while civil society is left behind.

April 2001 Quebec Ministerial Summit

During April 19-22, 2001, the leaders of the Western Hemisphere (excluding Cuba) met in Quebec City, Canada, to continue negotiations of the FTAA. Over 60,000 people were on the streets of Quebec protesting the meeting outside a specially erected fence, while over 200 solidarity protests took place across the U.S. and the hemisphere. At this meeting, these FTAA architects agreed to a draft of a negotiating document already finalized in Buenos Aires earlier in the month and to completing the FTAA by 2005. The pressure to implement the FTAA has been mounting in light of the defeat of the MAI at both the 1996 Ministerial meeting of the WTO, and at the OECD in 1998, and the shut-down of the Seattle Ministerial meeting of the WTO in December 1999. Many trade observers and pundits promoting the current global trade model 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.

Global Water Scarcity

It is clear that the earth's water systems cannot sustain our demands upon it. Over 30 countries are facing water stress and scarcity and over a billion people lack adequate access to clean drinking water. Science reveals that, because of operational limits and pollution, the earth’s water system can support at most only one more doubling of demand, estimated to occur in less than 30 years. By the year 2025, as much as two-thirds of the world's population will be living with some serious condition of water shortage or in absolute water scarcity. A recent report by the National Intelligence Council, a group that reports to the CIA, echoed this sentiment, finding that the main resource problem in 2015 will be water and that the instability created by shortages of water "will increasingly affect the national security of the United States."