Newsletter no 29 - FTAs and Agriculture

Editorial: FTAs and Agriculture
Illustration : Anthony Freda | www.AnthonyFreda.com
There is growing distrust and mobilisation against Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). FTAs hurt food sovereignty because they:
– Erase the possibility of public strategies supporting local markets.
– Lower or remove tariffs on imported goods, hurting local small-scale food producers who cannot compete with large subsidised agribusiness imports.
– Harmonise standards on food safety, pesticides, GMOs and (...)

Who is pushing FTAs? Free trade and investment agreements (FTAs) are deals between two or more governments outside the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Many political and economic elites in countries like the US, members of the European Union (EU), Japan and Australia have looked outside the WTO since they claim it doesn’t go far enough in setting global rules for the benefit of their corporations and their geopolitical objectives, while multilateral talks have moved slowly. Since the (...)

Investor state dispute settlement, what is at stake? One of the most damaging elements of free trade agreements and investment treaties is the "investor state dispute settlement" (ISDS). The mechanism stems from colonial times, when powerful empires wanted to protect their companies working overseas to extract minerals or produce cash crops. They created legal texts that evolved into today’s investment treaties, aiming to protect investors from “discrimination” and expropriation by foreign (...)

Box 1 - Chile vs. Trans Pacific Partnership
Since Trump announced the US withdrawal from the TPP, many people claim the agreement will end.
But Chile’s peoples are struggling against the TPP, being certain that some version of it will remain.
These are its main dangers:
1. The TPP is a continually evolving agreement, always giving more room to move to corporations, while closing the juridical paths for people to achieve justice.
2. National sovereignty becomes ambiguous; countries (...)

Voices from the field
Solidarity between movements
Lucile Falgueyrac from the Seattle to Brussels network (S2B), France
These past four years in Europe, we’ve built a real movement against the transatlantic free trade treaties.
Far from being limited to a few NGOs, this fight has brought together both local and international social movements, syndicates, peasants and activists from all horizons and sectors. From Bulgaria to Finland, the campaigns against the EU-US agreement and the (...)