Free Trade or Living Economies?

Could it be that doubts about the benefits of free trade are behind the "no" vote in France against the EU Constitution?

Could these doubts also be putting the brakes on CAFTA here in the U.S.?

A recent article by Seattle writer, Geov Parrish, suggests that the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) may be in trouble in the U.S. Congress. The New Democrats in Congress -- a group that has historically been pro-free trade -- and conservative southern representatives, worried about the sugar and textile industries, are joining the original opponents of NAFTA and opposing CAFTA, Parrish says.

Parrish's article, coming one year after the treaty was signed, suggests the ratification of CAFTA might be in trouble in spite of recent support from Central American political leaders. While corporate leaders like the freedoms embedded in these trade agreements, and have plenty of resources to share with political leaders who agree with them, the ordinary people in the United States and Central America stand to lose.

Like NAFTA, CAFTA promotes a race to the bottom of the wage scale, and worker and environmental protection. Local economies that sustain people over time are sacrificed for global corporations that leave town when forests or energy resources are depleted or when wages are lower elsewhere.

Economists say this sort of policy promotes growth, but growth figures distort the reality for people trying to raise families -- people who need long-term jobs, good schools, food security, clean water, a stable climate. When a farm that supplies a family and a community with reliable food is transformed into an agribusiness enterprise that supplies exotic crops for export, economists cheer it as growth, although the displaced families may go hungry.

Religious leaders from Central America have been visiting the US urging that CAFTA not be adopted, according to Parrish.

Here in the U.S., the wealthiest country in the world is finding it has no money to fund schools for the young and retirement for the aged. The structural adjustment programs that are part of the corporate-globalization agenda are affecting not only the people of the Third World, but those of the wealthy nations.

In 2003, I interviewed German Parliamentarian Ernst von Weizsaecker, and he noted the same thing happening in Germany. With the end of the Cold War, he said, the large corporations no longer believed they needed to support the social programs that have enabled the quality of life of Western Europeans. After all, with the fall of global communism, people believed they had no alternative but to rely on global corporations.

In 2004, I attended and spoke briefly to a rally called in Stuttgart, Germany, to protest the cut back of social services. Don't go the route of the U.S. in shredding the social safety net, I warned the crowd. Global competitiveness is not the way to prosperity for all -- only for the corporations that aim to play us against each other so they can walk away with the best deals.

It is good news indeed that Congress may be having doubts about CAFTA. And it is evidence, according to Parrish, of the strength of the movement that had its coming out in Seattle in 1999.

Is there a link between popular opposition to corporate-led globalizaiton and the vote in France against the European Constitution? News reports as of this morning are still sketchy, but The New York Times quotes a poll showing 46 percent of those who voted "no" did so out of fear of unemployment. Outsourcing and the arrival of low-paid workers was a large part of the debate leading up to the vote.

It will be important that this discontent not be read as blaming the poorer workers or immigrants for the problems faced by workers in the EU and US. All over the world, we need locally based economies that meet local needs first, and then trade only based on mutual benefit -- not at the behest of giant corporations with no loyalty to any people or place.

Building local living economies, as we discussed in the Fall 2002 issue of YES!, is the way to build the foundation for peace, abundance, cultural integrity, and environmental sanity. And if predictions about peak oil turn out to be correct, as increasing numbers of experts are warning, local living economies may prove to be the only kinds of economies that can meet our needs.