Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Nov 18 2005 (IPS) — Labour, environmental and public health groups, along with some U.S. legislators, are warning the George W. Bush administration to quit new free trade talks with Andean countries or face another bitter battle in Congress.

U.S. officials say they are discussing the U.S.-Andean Free Trade Agreement (AFTA) with officials from the Andean countries in Washington, and could announce a deal soon. Negotiations may conclude this month, perhaps before the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States on Nov. 24.

“We are meeting this week with Colombia, Peru and Ecuador,” the spokeswoman for the United States Trade Representative (USTR), Neena Moorjani, told IPS. “We are making some progress and narrowing differences.”

On a trip to Latin America to promote free trade earlier this month, President Bush said his country was intensifying talks in the final stages of the AFTA with the three nations and Panama.

But this week, several U.S. groups and some lawmakers voiced concerns that the deal includes a similar contentious package of rules on labour, agriculture and intellectual property rights that attracted opposition to previous deals.

Several members of Congress wrote to the Bush administration challenging AFTA, saying that it is modeled on the faulty Central America Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

CAFTA narrowly squeaked through the U.S. House of Representatives by just two votes in July after a heated debated and strong opposition. The deal removed barriers to U.S. trade with Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. NAFTA, a prototype of later deals, was signed in 1993 and liberalises trade among the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Both trade pacts have been criticised by labour groups, social equality organisations, and some economists and legislators who say free trade has done more harm than good, especially in developing nations and for the working class in the United States.

Critics here argue that unfettered trade deals take jobs from U.S. workers and place them in the hands of local elites in developing nations, who sometimes use sweatshops and exploit low labour standards. Opposition is also fed by the country’s skyrocketing trade deficit and job losses in some sectors.

“Our Congress made the wrong choice almost four months ago, and here we are again,” said Rep. Sherrod Brown. “AFTA is just as bad as NAFTA, just as bad as CAFTA for working families. These are failed policies that sell out American working families and ship American jobs overseas.”

Opponents charge that the text of AFTA lacks enforceable worker rights protections – the same grievance leveled at CAFTA.

“CAFTA was a bad idea for American working families, and our country cannot afford another trade deal that rewards countries which have poor labour standards,” said Congresswoman Linda Sanchez.

On the same wavelength are union activists who worry that the pact does not address labour problems in Andean nations, including the assassination of trade unionists in Colombia and the fragile labour laws throughout the region.

Limitations on the right to bargain collectively and to strike in the public and private sectors are cited among numerous examples of poor labour regulations there.

“This trade deal is simply unacceptable; more trade unionists have been murdered in the past decade in Colombia than in the rest of the world combined, and this is the country we single out for a trade agreement,” said Thea Lee, policy director for the AFL-CIO, a major labour confederation in the United States.

“This is a reward for violence and a climate of terror for working people. The current trade model simply does not work: poverty and income inequality are on the rise, especially in countries with whom we have agreements, and there is a rising trade deficit and a decline of wages and employment in the U.S,” she said.

Some groups say that issues at stake in AFTA, particularly agriculture and intellectual property rights, will also further drain wealth from the middle classes and the poor in Andean nations, eventually prompting more illegal immigration to the United States.

Studies by non-governmental organisations show that U.S. demands that those countries open up their agriculture markets may endanger the rural sector in the region. ACTA would entail the elimination of tariffs in Andean countries while maintaining U.S. farm subsidies.

Some predict that this may lead to increased coca production, as farmers resort to the only certain cash crop in the region – which would in turn undermine the current U.S. counter-drug policy of promoting alternative development in agriculture.

Intellectual property rights promoted by Washington could also jeopardise public health in those countries, which are already poor and suffer from limited expenditures on health, critics say. Among the provisions in the deal is the extension of patent protections from 20 to 25 years to compensate for delays in processing patents.

They also include a five-year ban on the use of the originator company’s test data for the approval of generic medicines, and the granting of “second use” patents when a new use is discovered for an existing medicine.

Like CAFTA, experts say all this will fuel more expensive drugs, straining already thin public health budgets and limiting access to affordable medicines to the poorest in the Andean region.

Earlier this month, 24 U.S. lawmakers, many of whom had opposed CAFTA, sent a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Portman expressing serious objections to AFTA.

“These concerns lead us to question whether the Andean FTA will in fact promote economic development in the Andean region, while at the same time generating new opportunities in the United States, or whether the agreement will bring with it more unemployment, greater insecurity, and crime,” the letter said.