Washington Fair Trade Coalition’s vision paper expresses what good trade policy would look like. The trade justice community is often characterized as saying no to trade agreements. The Coalition wanted to produce a set of positive principles for trade advocacy on behalf of people and the planet.
In drafting a people’s vision for fair and just trade policy, the Washington Fair Trade Coalition felt it was important to hear directly from the people in Washington State most affected by our trade policies. We convened a broad base of our membership to discuss our shared values and each group’s specific concerns. The working groups included workers and local union leadership; environmentalists; human rights activists; public health advocates; equity and racial justice organizations; farmworker, sustainable farm, and food access groups; immigrant rights groups, and international solidarity organizations. We focused on local groups in order to maximize in-person conversation, and also consulted with international allies throughout the process.
The recommendations that follow came out of this process.
“Trade negotiations should create the domestic space needed to protect social programs and regulations, renew domestic social contracts, and pursue locally tailored growth policies. Such a reorientation would benefit rich and poor nations alike.” –Dani Rodrik, Economist, Harvard University
Trade agreements set the rules for the global economy. In an increasingly globalizing world, good trade policy is part of a delicate balancing act, supporting local decision-making and innovation while fostering global cooperation.
It matters who writes those rules. For trade policies to work for all of us, we must have a negotiation process that includes all of our voices, balances our different interests, and allows us to adapt to changing conditions. Alone, no one group or sector has the entire solution to challenges that face us on a local and global level, from growing income inequality to climate change. Trade policy could be a tool in supporting those solutions – but only if it reflects the interests of the people it will affect.
Trade policies now: Corporations write the rules
When giant multinational corporations like Chevron, Walmart, Monsanto, Cargill, and Citibank set negotiating objectives with little public oversight, we get rules that benefit global corporations.
This is exactly what has been happening since NAFTA. Trade policies have been negotiated with increasing levels of secrecy, making it impossible for stakeholders and trade justice advocates in each country to review draft proposals or influence what is being proposed in their names. While each country has its own process for developing negotiating objectives, most countries cater to powerful multinational corporations, desperate to attract business and jobs. Corporate negotiators typically pit country against country in a race to the bottom for standards.
The corporate-friendly rules set in current trade negotiations are designed to be permanent. These deals —made behind closed doors— have eliminated vital regulations and programs, locking governments into policies such as privatization or maintaining energy exports, while limiting the ways communities and governments can respond to future problems.
Good trade policy prioritizes the public interest:
The public has a say in setting priorities
Negotiations are open, transparent, and inclusive
Countries must meet their commitments before the trade deal goes into effect
Hold governments and corporations accountable to local communities
Trade policies should be subject to periodic review
“Food is our most intimate connection to each other, to our cultures, and to the earth, and to transform our food system is to take one giant step towards healing our bodies, our economy, and our environment.” –HEAL (Health, Environment, Agriculture, Labor) Alliance platform for real food
Food is vital to all beings on the planet. Communities have the right to define their own food systems –how people produce and access food, where foods come from, what they know about them, which foods are important, and what makes food safe— without intervention or pressure from trade policies. However, once food crosses borders, local protection may be required.
Trade policy needs to support efforts to build a fairer food system, in which all people can access the foods they need and are culturally important. Food must be produced and distributed fairly. The people who grow, harvest, transport, process, and sell food deserve safe work conditions and economic stability. Sustainable and bio-diverse food production has to be prioritized, to limit agriculture’s contribution to climate change and to ensure our ability to produce food long-term.
Trade Policies Now: Food Monopolies, Pollution, Hunger, and Unsafe Food
Trade agreements such as the WTO and NAFTA have favored multinational agribusiness corporations at the expense of small farmers, agricultural workers, consumers, and the environment.
Trade agreements have made it easier for corporate farms to shift production to low-cost and low–regulation sites. Agribusinessconstructed supply chains across countries from seed to supermarket, concentrating market and political power and hogging the benefits of trade.
Through NAFTA, subsidized U.S. agribusiness soldcorn to Mexico at below-market prices, driving two million small farmers off land, into poverty, or across the border. In the U.S., over 200,000 small farmers have left agriculture since NAFTA, while corporate concentration has rapidly increased.
Transnational corporations rely on industrial agricultural methods that contribute mightily to toxic chemical contamination, land and water degradation, and climate change. Existing trade agreements do not allow the policy space communities need to address these serious problems, or to support local farmers, workers, or families. They do the opposite by allowing powerful multinationals to challenge any policies that harm their profitability.
Trade agreements have also been used to undermine food safety, by “harmonizing” (to the lowest standard) inspection regimes. Trade rulings have challenged our right to know what is in our food or where it comes from, striking down country-of-origin and dolphin-safe tuna labeling.
Good trade policy supports food sovereignty:
Consumers can trust they have safe and healthy food
People decide what information about their food is publicly available
Workers, producers, and agricultural families have dignity and economic security
Responsible producers are protected in the global economy
Communities can build and protect local food systems
“Restoring our planet’s health will require a lasting redistribution of power and resources. Recognizing our common heritage of food, water, and energy should be at the heart of a new framework for global resources management.” – Gopal Dayaneni & Mateo Nube, Movement Generation
Trade policy must support the need for a secure and safe world, now and into the future. This means encouraging ecological balance and diversity, creating protections from natural disasters, and making sure that environmental protection cannot be held hostage to investor interests.
It also means promoting business models that put the long-term gains for the many over the short term benefits for the few. Natural resources need to be stewarded for the common good, not privatized and unsustainably exploited. Communities that have been exploited in the past must be supported in development and mitigation efforts. Trade policies must recognize the tremendous threat climate change poses and support international and local efforts to plan and implement a just transition to a sustainable, low-carbon, resource-balanced society that promotes people’s rights, honors their work, and protects the well-being and integrity of all life on the planet.
Trade Policies Now: Holding Environmental Protections Hostage to Global Profits
Current trade policy puts maximized trade and short-term profits above the welfare of people and the planet.
Trade agreements have many detailed chapters protecting corporate rights to invest and not be “burdened” by regulation, even creating an arbitration body where corporations can challenge regulations and demand unlimited compensation. When (after intense public pressure) environmental protections are included in trade policies, enforcement is weak or nonexistent.
These corporate rights enshrined in trade agreements have encouraged powerful companies to cut costs, degrade the environment, pollute, and strip resources unsustainably. Society is forced to foot the bill for increased health problems and natural disasters. When local governments try to enforce or raise environmental standards, corporate polluters outsource factories to where they can negotiate lower standards. They then import these cheap goods made on the backs of workers and the environment, at an unfair advantage over companies that follow the rules.
In fact, most of the policies that will be required to address the climate crisis –for example, creating green jobs and buy local initiatives, restricting fossil fuel infrastructure and exports, and ramping up a set of global environmental standards—have been repeatedly struck down by trade agreements as illegal trade barriers.
Good trade policy promotes a sustainable future:
Support the right to a healthy, sustainable, and safe environment
Make polluters and extractive industries pay their fair share
Give preference to ethical, sustainable production
Support and prioritize local economies
Create a fair playing field by setting basic environmental standards
“Recent trade agreements increase the need for public policy intervention to counteract rising health inequalities but at the same time reduce the capacity of national governments to invest in intervention.” –Tim Huijts and Courtney McNamara
Trade agreements must support healthy communities and environments, improving the possibilities for people to reach their full potential and have a high quality of life–affordable quality food, clean water, health care, housing, education, work, and many other elements. Fostering healthy communities will require important changes in trade agreements. Access to life saving medicines and programs addressing global public health needs must be prioritized. Since poverty and inequality are major drivers of poor health, provisions of trade agreements also need to support social policy tools that benefit society as a whole.
Trade Policies Now: Profits Above Health
Instead of supporting the global and local strategies necessary to promote health and well-being, the WTO and subsequent trade policies have repeatedly been used to challenge public health policies.
Since the 1994 WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), pharmaceutical companies have pushed for stronger monopoly protections in trade deals. Access to generic drugs is critical to make life-saving medicines affordable; in the case of AIDS, the production of generic medicines in India brought prices for a year’s treatment down from $10,000 (in 2000) to around $100 in just one decade, making possible the treatment of massive numbers of people living with HIV. Despite this, big pharmaceutical companies have lobbied for provisions that would allow them to extend patents by making minor modifications to old medicine or limiting access to data from clinical trials.
Corporate interests have extended far beyond medicines. Multinational corporations producing tobacco, alcohol, highly processed food, breast milk substitutes and other potentially health-damaging products have used trade agreements to challenge public health programs that are designed to control their use. Using corporate arbitration panels, these companies have demanded—and in some cases won—compensation for lost profits, effectively discouraging new regulations.
Public services such as healthcare have been subjected to massive privatization and deregulation measures, using the unsubstantiated claim that opening up the market to competition is good for patients. Instead of improving access and lowering prices for healthcare, these private health corporations have often focused on cutting costs and serving the patients who were most profitable, at the expense of the poor and most vulnerable of a country’s population.
Good Trade Policy Builds Strong Healthy Communities:
Ensure the ability of countries to pass laws protecting and promoting the public health
Regulate products and services that damage public health
Keep life-saving medicines affordable and accessible
Promote equitable access to healthcare
“Goods produced under conditions which do not meet a rudimentary standard of decency should be regarded as contraband and not allowed to pollute the channels of international commerce.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, U.S. President 1933-1945
A trade policy that works for everyone – here in Washington State, in the U.S., and around the world— must improve economic and social stability for all.
All work has dignity, and workers deserve a share of the wealth they create. In a globalized economy, trade policies must set minimum work standards and protections on a global level, and also encourage a race to the top for worker safety and well being. This includes building transparency and accountability along entire supply chains, and protecting and supporting the right of workers to organize and build power so that they earn a fair wage, are safe, healthy, and economically secure. This also means maintaining a strong public sector and safety net, and regulating financial speculation and other practices that destabilize the economy.
Companies must also be accountable to, and invest in, the communities where they operate; this means paying their taxes and living wages, contributing to local infrastructure, using ethical suppliers, and, if production shifts or changes, working with local communities to support a transition. Any equitable trade policy must also acknowledge the longstanding institutional racism, sexism, colonialism, and unfair treatment of immigrants that has impacted the opportunities available to different communities, and should support efforts to remediate and eliminate those historic and ongoing wrongs.
Trade Policies Now: Pitting workers against each other in the race to the bottom
NAFTA established a new corporate-centric framework for globalization, allowing companies to pit workers against each other by moving production to low-wage regions and shipping the products back to sell in high-wage regions. Entire industries moved – home appliances, textiles, clothing, steel, electronics, call centers, automobile production– consolidating on unprecedented levels.
These global giants accumulated political power, often forcing out smaller businesses which were trying to pay their workforce a living wage. As good paying work disappeared and wages stagnated, entire communities were devastated and millions of workers forced to migrate in search of economic opportunity.
When challenged by workers or communities to improve conditions and invest locally, global companies claimed this would make them less competitive in the global economy and threatened to move. Often, governments cut social services to cover concessions to large businesses. Attempts to mandate local job creation, build transparency in supply chains, or regulate financial flows, have all been challenged as barriers to trade.
Good trade policy puts workers and their communities first:
Set minimum working standards on a global level
Empower working people to raise standards
Hold corporations accountable
Promote economic stability on the individual, community, national, and global levels
Protect and encourage the ability of local governments to invest in the local economy
Vision-paper (pdf)
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