What is the FTAA?

		Sites to Check Out: www.stopftaa.org www.ftaaresistance.org www.infoshop.org/octo/ftaa_miami.php www.ftaaimc.org

This week the city of Miami will be hosting an international meeting of all the governments of the Western Hemisphere (except for the communist government of Cuba). The topic of the meeting is the highly controversial Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The FTAA is an expansion of the now 10-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which eliminated trade restrictions between Canada, the US, and Mexico.

In its previous gathering in Quebec City, Canada in 2001, the FTAA was met with incredible resistance where the perimeter fence protecting those at the meeting from the voices of dissent (yes, there will be a fence in Miami as well) was torn down and the Canadian police were overwhelmed by the amount of people actively resisting the summit.

But why were so many people protesting in Quebec City, and why are thousands of protestors, many of them young people, going to Miami to protest? In order to better understand how the proposed expansion of a continental free trade zone could negatively affect the rest of the countries in central and southern America, it is useful to look at what NAFTA has done for the people of Mexico and the US.

NAFTA allows free trade between Canada, Mexico, and the US. This may sound like a good thing for the economies of the countries, but working people of North America and the environment have suffered negative consequences.

Workers and Farmers

A flyer for the protests.

Seven years into NAFTA, the minimum wage in Mexico has dropped 18 percent while the manufacturing wage has dropped 21 percent. The drop in manufacturing wages has come with the increase of maquiladoras, which are factories established within Mexico that are run in sweatshop conditions. During these first seven years of NAFTA the number of maquiladoras in Mexico jumped from 546,433 to 1,240,840 (more than double). These jobs, however, did not come out of nowhere, but are jobs that had once resided in the US. Many companies have escaped south of the border for cheaper labor and lax environmental laws. While the number of US workers that have lost their jobs due to NAFTA is not available, as of June 2001, 356,000 workers had qualified for a special retraining program for workers whose previous employees had moved to Mexico or Canada or had shut down due to competition from these countries.

One of the counter arguments against this critique is that the corporations that move to Mexico are providing a source of income for the population by providing them with work. This is not the case as the number of people living in poverty has actually increased by about 10%, even though productivity has also increased by 47.7 percent.

Also, many of the employees of the newly formed maquiladoras were not necessarily unemployed from the start. The central aspect of free trade, as the name implies, is the free flow of goods into and out of countries without any imposition of tariffs. As a result, large farming corporations from the US have flooded the Mexican market with cheaper crops. Farmers who have traditionally relied on agriculture for their sustenance and income have not been able to compete with the large American corporations and have been pushed to working in maquiladoras.

The Environment

The effect that NAFTA has had on the environment is especially devastating. Corporations that are constantly looking to maximize their profits are cutting their costs, and the environment is paying the price. According to research done at Tufts University, air pollution levels in Mexico have doubled in the three years following the implementation of NAFTA. While US and Canadian corporations benefit from NAFTA, they do so at the expense of the Mexican environment.