World poor in sale of the 21st century

Democratic rights are a high price to pay for western free trade

Naomi Klein
The Guardian(London) Friday April 6, 2001

Naomi Klein

Trade ministers from the 34 countries negotiating the Free Trade Area of
the Americas will today meet in Buenos Aires. Many in Latin America
predict that the ministers will be greeted with protests much larger than
the ones that exploded in Seattle in 1999.

The FTAA's cheerleaders like to pretend that their only critics are white

college kids from Harvard and McGill who just don't understand how much
"the poor" are "clamouring" for the FTAA. Will this public display of
Latin American opposition to the trade deal change all that?

Don't be silly.

Mass protests in the developing world don't register in our discussions
about trade here in the west. No matter how many people take to the
streets of Buenos Aires, Mexico City or Sao Paulo, defenders of
corporate-driven globalisation just keep on insisting that every possible
objection lobbed their way was dreamed up in Seattle, by somebody with
newly matted dreadlocks slurping a latte.

When we talk about trade, we often focus on who is getting richer and who
is getting poorer. But there is another divide at play: which countries
are presented as diverse, complicated political landscapes where citizens
have a range of divergent views, and which countries seem to speak on the
world stage in an ideological monotone.

In western Europe, the foot and mouth inferno puts the entire model of
export-oriented industrial agriculture on trial. In North America, we are
finally hearing the debates about whether or not more of the same model of
deregulation, privatisation and liberalisation will protect their heath
and education and water systems.

And yet such diversity of public opinion is rarely attributed to citizens
of third world countries. Instead, they are lumped into one homogenous
voice, channelled by dubiously elected politicians or better yet, ousted
ones like Mexico's Ernesto Zedillo, now calling for a global campaign
against "globophobes".

The truth is that no one can speak on behalf of Latin America's 500m
inhabitants, least of all Mr Zedillo, whose defeat was in part a
repudiation of Nafta's record. All over the Americas, market
liberalisation is a subject of extreme dispute.

The debate is not over whether foreign investment and trade are desirable
- Latin America and the Caribbean are already organised into regional
trading groups such as Mercosur. The debate is about democracy: what terms
and conditions will poor countries be told they must meet to qualify for
trade and investment?

For the past two decades, these terms and conditions have been negotiated
and enforced by the IMF and the World Bank in exchange for loans. Social
services have been privatised, user fees introduced, agricultural
subsidies cut (while richer countries kept theirs), hard-won land
redistribution programs abandoned, and the minimum wage has been
controlled - all in the name of becoming "investment ready".

Argentina, the host of the current FTAA ministers' meeting, is currently
in open revolt over massive cuts to social spending - almost $8bn over
three years - that have been introduced to qualify for an IMF loan
package. Three cabinet ministers have resigned, unions staged a general
strike, and university instructors moved their classes to the streets.

Though anger at wrenching austerity measures has focused primarily on the
IMF, it is rapidly expanding to encompass trade deals such as the proposed
FTAA. The Zapatistas began their uprising on January 1 1994 - the day the
North American Free Trade Agreement came into force.

Seven years later, 75% of the population of Mexico lives in poverty, real
wages are lower than they were in 1994, and unemployment is rising.

No wonder the Zapatistas were able to draw 150,000 supporters to the
streets of Mexico City last month. And despite the claims that the rest of
Latin America is clamouring for a Nafta to call its own, the central
labour associations of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay -
representing 20m workers - have come out against the plan. They are now
calling for nationwide referendums on membership in the FTAA.

Brazil, meanwhile, has threatened to boycott the summit altogether,
furious at Canada's dirty trade war and wary that the FTAA will contain
protections for drug companies that will threaten its visionary public
health policy of providing free generic Aids drugs to anyone who needs
them.

Defenders of free trade would have us believe in a facile equation of
Trade = Democracy. The people who will greet American trade ministers on
the streets of Buenos Aires next week are posing a more complex and
challenging calculation: how much democracy should they be asked to give
up in exchange for trade?

Naomi Klein writes a fortnightly column

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