The US-Colombia "fair" trade agreement

The US-Colombia Unfair Trade Agreement: Just Say No!

With Congress back in session, the Bush Administration is pushing hard to pass another trade agreement based on the failed NAFTA model, this time with Colombia. The Administration is in a race against public opinion, which is quickly turning against the kind of neoliberal trade deals that have worsened poverty and inequality in every country where they have been implemented and led to a massive loss of jobs in the United States. The proposed Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Colombia promises more of the same. The deal will also strengthen Colombia's government, which is responsible for severe human rights violations.

With more and more people—in Latin America and in the US—becoming aware of the repercussions of unfair trade rules, MADRE has urged its members to take action and to let their Congressional representatives know that a vote for this trade agreement is a vote for:

1. Worsening Rural Poverty and Hunger

The FTA cuts tariffs on food imported from the US but benefits only the few Colombian farmers who export to the US. Moreover, the deal bars the Colombian government from subsidizing farmers, while large-scale US corn and rice growers enjoy billions in subsidies. These double standards guarantee that US agribusiness can undersell Colombian farmers, who will face bankruptcy as a result. Many of Colombia's small-holder farmers are women and Indigenous Peoples who are losing their livelihoods and being forced off their lands.

2. Fueling Armed Conflict and Drug Trafficking

The intertwined crises of poverty, landlessness and inequality are at the root of Colombia's 50-year armed conflict. The FTA will further concentrate wealth in the hands of a few while worsening poverty for millions of people. Many Colombian farmers, whose livelihoods will be destroyed by the FTA, will be compelled to cultivate coca (the raw material for producing cocaine) to earn a living.

Continuing a trend begun in the wake of 9-11, the US has cast the FTA as a matter of its "national security," and the Colombian government has followed suit by treating anyone opposed to the deal as a terrorist. Colombia's workers, Afro-Colombians and Indigenous Peoples have taken a clear position against the FTA. Their peaceful protests have been met with severe repression, including murder.

3. Repressing Labor Rights

Colombia is already the world's deadliest country for trade unionists, with more than 2,000 labor activists killed since 1991. The FTA does not require Colombia to meet international core labor standards; it merely calls on the government to abide by its own weak labor laws. Without enforceable labor protections, the trade deal will put more workers at risk. US workers' power to negotiate better wages will also be weakened by a deal that allows corporations operating in Colombia to keep labor costs down through sheer violence.

4. Exacerbating Climate Change and Threatening Biodiversity

The FTA will increase logging in the Colombian Amazon, weakening the rainforest's capacity to stabilize the Earth's climate. Under provisions sought by the US, corporations that have bought the rights to a country’s forests, fishing waters, mineral deposits or oil reserves can totally deplete these resources, with grave consequences to ecosystems and the many species that inhabit them. Small-scale farmers and Indigenous Peoples who depend directly on these natural resources will be the first people to suffer.

5. Subordinating National Sovereignty to Corporations

By allowing corporations to sue governments for passing laws that could reduce profits, the FTA erodes Colombia's prerogative to regulate foreign investment and undermines citizens' chances of improving health, safety and environmental laws. In anticipation of the FTA, the US pressed Colombia to pass a law that would expropriate land from Indigenous and Afro-Colombians and allow multinational corporations to gain control of millions of hectares of rainforest. The forestry law was part of a series of constitutional "reforms" undertaken to meet the conditions of a US trade agreement. In January 2008, Colombian civil society won an important victory: the forestry law was struck down as a violation of Indigenous rights. Had the FTA already been in place, US corporations would now be allowed to sue the Colombian government for "lost future profits."

6. Deteriorating Public Health

By extending patent rights on medicines produced in the US, the FTA hinders the use of far cheaper generic drugs and puts life-saving medicines out of reach for millions of Colombians. Women, who are over-represented among the poor and primarily responsible for caring for sick family members, are particularly harmed by this provision.

7. Loss of Vital Public Services

The FTA requires the Colombian government to sell off critical public services, including water, healthcare and education. Elsewhere in Latin America, this kind of privatization has resulted in sharp rate increases by new corporate owners that deny millions of people access to essential services. Women are hardest hit because it is most often their responsibility to meet their families' needs for such basic services.

8. Harming Indigenous Women

The FTA would enable corporations to exploit Indigenous Peoples’ traditional knowledge by allowing companies to patent seeds, plants, animals and certain medical procedures developed and used by Indigenous women over centuries. Under the FTA, Indigenous women could lose access to important medicinal plants and agricultural seeds unless they pay royalties to patent holders. Indigenous women’s role as the protectors of their community’s natural resources and traditional knowledge would be eroded, threatening Indigenous cultures and women’s status within the community.

There Are Viable Alternatives to Free Trade Agreements

Despite more than a decade of failed NAFTA-style trade deals, the US continues to insist that its trading partners adhere to rigid neoliberal economic policies. But Latin America’s social movements are articulating viable alternatives for regulating trade and economic integration in ways that benefit women, families, communities and the environment. The women of MADRE’s sister organizations in Colombia and throughout Latin America affirm the need for Fair Trade Agreements that:

1. Are negotiated through democratic processes with effective participation from communities that will be impacted, including women’s organizations.


2. Ensure that life-sustaining resources such as water, food staples and medicinal plants are guaranteed to all people and not reduced to commodities.


3. Ensure that access to basic services, including health care, housing, education, water and sanitation, are recognized as human rights that governments are obligated—and empowered—to protect.


4. Institute the region’s highest, rather than lowest, standards for labor rights and health, safety and environmental protections.


5. Adopt principles of “fair trade,” including social security and development assistance programs that protect small farmers and workers and that recognize the economic value of women’s unpaid labor in the household.


6. Require foreign investors to contribute to the economic development of the communities where they have a presence.


7. Promote policies that respect local cultures and collective Indigenous rights and that preserve traditional agricultural techniques and biodiversity in agriculture and nature.


8. Recognize the links between economic growth, environmental sustainability and building peace.




source: MADRE

Starting Point

From a school's webpage:

"We define our teaching method as "Transformative Educaction," since it is created with the idea of making personal and social transformation possible. We say that each human being has, in their essence, something they ignore; existence itself is the manifestation of that ignorance. Nonetheless, life is the (only) possibility to get out of this predicament; education should be an element that contributes to existential understanding and comprehension."

My summary: existence is the manifestation of our lack of comprehension regarding our essence. Being alive is our only chance to understand our essence and never have to be born again. I am going to have to disagree completely.

Religions create dogmas and ideas and then pawn them off as absolute truths. The above philosophy (based on buddhism) supposedly is about becoming free in thought and action; yet the philosophy itself is establishing guidelines with which we are supposed to view and judge the world. We are alive. This is a predicament. We would not be alive if we understood the essence of being. So we must try to understand our essence in order to not have to keep being born.

What if I said - We are alive. This is a predicament. We would not suffer in this life if we did not have original sin. So we must try to maintain a belief in god in order to not suffer eternally - ?

I'm tired of every religion creating a starting point that says our existence is punishment. Does learning that not seem like something important in our formation and how we view things? Thinking that 1) we have to suffer and 2) it's our fault. Existence as our fault? Is a dog at fault? Or a chicken? Or a tree? What are they guilty for? But they suffer, and they exist! This establishing existence as something negative is bound to shape our worldview, how we interpret the things that happen to us, and ultimately, create confusion. We go through life cursing our days and our very existence, viewing it as a "problem," or a "punishment," even though we didn't DO anything.

It's all dogma, some of it is just better disguised.


I maintain that these things are not true:

1- The material world came first, and then later (and separately) man appeared.

Man is a result of evolution, the same evolution that created crustaceans and tornados. We are a natural product of the development of the cosmos, a species that came about and continues to morph, as does the entire Earth and all of existence. The Earth is not a static place, even though we are taught to view it as such. It is constantly changing. It did not exist first and then we appeared from some other dimension to "do something." This worldview separates us from the rest of the world, from everything that's around us, when in reality, our very cells are made up of the same materials as we see in our surroundings, and when we die, will become parts of cells of other organisms. That's why we go about completely dissconected and abusive of the rest of the world. We're part of this.


2 - Existence is "equal to" or a "result of" guilt.

Existence is. Guilt and being punished is a human concept, created to try and establish some kind of security and order in our societies. When a snail dries up on a sunny day and dies, do we say it is guilty? No, it's natural. We have arisen as a species as part of a natural process. The psychological suffering we endure during our lives is, indeed, due to a misunderstanding of the essence of life, but we are not being punished.


3 - Each person has a separate and unique "soul."

Each person has an "ego," a persona, a personality which is the result of a combination of their genes and their environment. We are convinced that we existed before we were born, but what, exactly, existed? Life is a current that flows beneath all of these physical bodies that we see, it alone is the constant - each person/personality is but an accumulation of their past.


4 - Reincarnation - where there is a definite, unchanging entity that remains intact throughout it's various "lives."

See number three. Personally, I think that reincarnation could originally have been used to mean the constant interchange of energy in the world; when you eat an apple, it dies and it becomes part of you, when you die, you are buried and become part of the soil, which then nurtures a tree, etc. I think that reincarnation then became used as an excuse to maintain a status quo in society; think caste system. It is the Eastern version of original sin - you are in the lowest class because you deserve to be there, I am in the highest class because I behaved in a past life. What does an amoeba have to do to move up in the system? But it is an excellent way to avoid uprisings from the lower class and assure privelages to the higher class, and remove any responsibility the higher class may have had towards the lower.



My point is (do I have one? maybe) - don't let dogmas influence and create your worldview. Don't even take what I say as truth. Be daring and forget everything you were taught, and go find out the truth for yourself.