Toward a New Foreign Policy.

Key Recommendations

* Trade negotiations should be opened up to include a broader representation of society.

* Labor, environmental, and other relevant social issues should be included in the negotiation of trade agreements.

* Investment policy should balance investors' needs for clear rules with the regulating needs of each country's development strategy.

The Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA), a network of unions, environmentalists and women's, family-farm, consumers' and other progressive organizations representing some 46 million people in the Americas is working to combine critiques of the official FTAA process with alternative proposals. It advocates a model of integration based on raising environmental, labor, and other social standards throughout the hemisphere.

A critical first step is opening the FTAA process to a broader representation of social sectors. In fact, the HSA and other citizen organizations have been calling for greater transparency and participation in decision-making on trade accords. In November 2000, more than 330 groups (all but 50 of which from outside the U.S.) sent a letter with those demands to the head of the FTAA Trade Negotiations Committee.

In addition to demanding the release of the FTAA draft text, the letter criticized the existing mechanism for civil society input, the Committee of Government Representatives on the Participation of Civil Society, that serves as a kind of suggestion box. Submissions from civil society are summarized and delivered to trade ministers at the periodic ministerial meetings. During the first round of submissions, the committee received 71 letters, ranging from short notes to comprehensive proposals. These were summarized into a five-page document delivered to the ministers some eight months later.

According to Alternatives for the Americas: Building a Peoples' Hemispheric Agreement, which was prepared by activists and scholars from the hemisphere, labor, environmental, and other relevant social issues must be included in the negotiation process. The resulting agreements should affirm such internationally recognized accords as the International Labor Organization Conventions, the United Nations Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, and the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights. Additionally, any consensus reached on these issues must be included within the text of the FTAA agreement, not in unenforceable side agreements.

Language regulating investments should also be changed to balance investors' needs for clear rules with the development objectives of national economies. Governments should retain the right to impose performance requirements on foreign investors and should be allowed to protect small and medium-scale producers and other key economic sectors in order to promote national development priorities. Each country's right to maintain food and nutritional security (for example, by excluding basic grains from trade-liberalization measures) should also be guaranteed. Likewise, governments must be free to regulate without having to compensate foreign investors for "economic harms." Until such time as the substantive rules reflect greater balance between granting broad new rights to corporations and imposing concomitant responsibilities, the investor-state mechanism has no place in the FTAA.

The Alternatives document outlines a comprehensive approach to achieving a different kind of trade agreement. It is a central organizing paper of the Hemispheric Social Alliance. Even were the FTAA defeated, or NAFTA repealed, many of the existing rules on corporate-led globalization would remain in place. The Alternatives document offers a vision of what a fundamentally different kind of economic integration could be.

In its recent statement on the FTAA, the AFL-CIO issued a challenge. "An acceptable hemispheric agreement must not simply replicate the failed trade policies of the past, but must incorporate what we have learned about the problems and weaknesses of the current rules," the labor federations Executive Council said. "The success or failure of any hemispheric trade and investment agreement will hinge on governments' willingness and ability to develop an economic integration agreement that appropriately addresses all of the social, economic, and political dimensions of trade and investment, not just those of concern to corporations." Unions and citizen groups in other countries in the Americas have expressed similar concerns. They will continue to press for a different kind of economic integration than that embodied in NAFTA or the current FTAA proposals, one designed to promote equitable and sustainable development for all of the peoples involved.

Karen Hansen-Kuhn <[e-mail]> is trade program coordinator at The Development GAP and international coordinator of the Alliance for Responsible Trade.