Globalize This!

DR-CAFTA

Even after more than 13 years of environmental degradation and dramatically increasing gaps between the rich and poor which have left workers in the U.S., Canada, and México out in the cold, the Bush Administration continues to push the NAFTA model on other countries through Latin America.

The mistakes of NAFTA have been duplicated and codified in the text of the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), which was negotiated starting in 2003 between the United States, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua--the Dominican Republic later joined the negotiations in 2004--and signed in 2005.

The agreement requires, among many other stipulations, that 80% of all tariffs on U.S. goods entering CAFTA nations be eliminated immediately and that the remaining tariffs be phased out over the next ten years.

CAFTA represents the next step toward the swallowing of the American continents by shady, back-room trade deals like those that gave rise NAFTA.

However, opposition groups in Costa Rica quickly organized to demonstrate against the agreement, citing the threat that CAFTA poses to the environment, workers, economic sustainability, and Costa Rican autonomy and have successfully forced the government to acknowledge the voice of the people in the public arena.

For the first time in the history of Costa Rica, the people will have the opportunity to vote in a referendum, in which they will be asked to decide whether or not to accept CAFTA. The referendum is looming and the outcome is by no means guaranteed.

One thing is clear, CAFTA was written in the interest of multinational corporations at the expense of Costa Ricans

A secret government memorandum dated July 29, 2007 from the Vice President of Costa Rica to the current President entitled, "A Few Urgent Actions to Activate the Yes to the Free Trade Agreement Campaign,"

"The debate will not be won by either the government or the businesses alone, but a coalition could win it. [...] The campaign regarding the FTA is turning into what we should have never allowed to take place: a struggle between the rich and the poor and between the people and the government. [...] It is urgently needed that we place in the campaign, at the very least, small businesses, solidaristas1, and to whatever extent possible, cooperativism. And when we say 'place in the campaign, it is simply to make the faces of their leaders 'appear' everywhere. [...] True that in solidarism in particular, there is not strong national leadership; if that is the case, then it must be created."

1 Solidaristas are people who espouse solidarismo, an anti-trade unionist movement in Costa Rica that promotes cooperative labor/management relations by offering workers rewards for their collective bargaining rights, including the right to strike.

CAFTA, if implemented by the Costa Rican government like other parties to the agreement, would phase out tariffs on U.S. goods allowing heavily subsidized U.S. agriculture to flood Costa Rican markets. Unable to compete against the artificially low price of U.S. goods, domestic farmers will be driven out of business and into the ranks of the unemployed--this is not merely forecasting but the empirical results of the North American Free Trade Agreement in México.

CAFTA provides for the accelerated destruction of the environment

CAFTA minimizes the Central American governments' capacity to protect their natural resources, including sensitive rainforests and aquatic environments. Among other insidious provisions, CAFTA would give the upper hand to large agribusiness firms that seek to destroy native ecosystems to free up more land for the mass production of cash crops and who have been responsible in recent years for the burning of cane fields, contributing significantly to air pollution and acid rain.

CAFTA creates dependence economies.

The economic theory underpinning so-called 'free trade' agreements encourages the kind of fierce international economic competition that leaves small countries like Costa Rica dependent on two or three exports as the primary underpinnings of the entire country's economy. This form of 'mono-culture' has historically left countries in the Global South dangerously dependent on cash crops for export. When the price of these goods plummets, so does the economy that has been built around it.

CAFTA will repeat the mistakes of NAFTA throughout Central America.

Thirteen years since NAFTA's inauguration and México has yet to witness the ephemeral benefits of the falsely labeled "free trade" regime. Indigenous people have been moved from their lands so that cattle and coffee producers can swallow up every last inch of fertile soil, unemployment remains rampant, and a majority of Mexicans continue to live on less than $2 a day.