FTAA Ship Runs Aground, But Party Goes On

At the Miami FTAA summit last week, a festive cruise ship full of trade ministers and lobbyists ran aground for several hours on its voyage to a plush island resort. Eventually the ship was salvaged and the partying continued, much to the relief of the host committee.

It may have been symbolic of the week's events.

A huge but empty trade agreement -- widely described as "FTAA Lite" -- was all the US could achieve after being buffeted for weeks by rising fair trade winds. But the jolly ship of neo-liberalism was salvaged in Miami rather than torpedoed, receiving life support from its most formidable critic, Brazil, and causing confusing challenges for the global justice movement in its wake.

Fair trade leader Lori Wallach, her voice nearly broken, summed up the dilemma at a rally at Miami's Bayfront Park last Wednesday. "The good news is that the US-Bush expansion of NAFTA has been pushed back and derailed. The bad news is that the boneheads and their client governments are still on their mission. We can't let this happen. This is an avoidable disaster. We are stuck with NAFTA and the WTO, but this one is avoidable. We've got to go back and do the hardest work, electing people who represent us."

Global Exchange co-founder Medea Benjamin also emphasized a positive spin as well. "These trade ministers went away hungry. The agreement was a buffet with no nutrients." Then, shifting to another metaphor used by critics, she added that, "The FTAA train left the station, but the boxcars were empty."

Several questions remain to be sorted out: the content of the agreement itself, whether it can be revived, and why Latin American countries unanimously supported further negotiations, seeming to ignore or marginalize social movements in their own countries.

Empty Boxcars

As veteran New York Times trade correspondent Elizabeth Becker wrote before Miami, the US agenda was "to avoid another debacle" like Cancun, where the September WTO meeting was derailed by a new bloc of countries including Brazil, India, China and South Africa, demanding greater access to US markets especially for their agricultural products.

The Bush Administration resisted any reductions in its protectionist agricultural tariffs (and steel tariffs as well), a gesture to its critical electoral support in the farm belt. For example, Gov. Jeb Bush's citrus growers would have gone ballistic at any reductions of their 28.7 cents-per-gallon tariff against Brazil's imported orange juice. (NYT, Oct. 28) While yielding nothing on tariffs, the US and the European Union demanded greater privatization and deregulation for their corporate investors, an agenda that was shunned by Brazil and its allies. To the ire of the US, the Cancun meeting collapsed abruptly, and shudders traveled through the corporate and political worlds.

Showing that markets are really a function of politics, the US was determined to assure a diplomatic "victory" for its trade agenda in Miami. To fail again would be comparable with the US debacle in Iraq going into an election year in which voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina (for starters) are so angry that the Democratic presidential candidates are being forced to talk about "fair trade" after a decade of liberal fantasies about NAFTA and the WTO.

The scaling back to "FTAA Lite" was a "severe disappointment" to US corporate lobbies, according to the Financial Times. The "opt out" provision, by which countries could pick and choose which rules to follow, was a "cop out," business lobbyists told the Miami Herald. The New York Times editorial board condemned the Bush Administration's "shocking" betrayal of the editors' apparent dream of a "more muscular trade deal." (Ever since Lori Wallach dubbed the FTAA "NAFTA on steroids," the drug analogies keep popping up.)