{"id":955,"date":"2005-07-01T04:21:35","date_gmt":"2005-07-01T08:21:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=955"},"modified":"2008-06-08T18:50:06","modified_gmt":"2008-06-08T23:50:06","slug":"how-sweet-it-is-for-powerfull-lobbyists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=955","title":{"rendered":"How sweet it is – for powerful lobbyists"},"content":{"rendered":"

Are sugar producers being used by the Bush administration to push through CAFTA? During the last election, “Sugar gave about the same amount of money to federal politicians as did the dairy industry which is 10 times larger,” according to Kimberly Elliot<\/a> of the Institute for International Economics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So far<\/a>, U.S. sugar producers have been offered a deal via quotas on imports promising exports “could quickly double”. According to U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman<\/a>, an “insurance” clause has been written into the agreement. If imports hurt sugar producers the imports will be stopped and compensation paid to those exporters. Although the sugar industry has said this is still not enough, “the Senate approved the Central American Free Trade Agreement last night<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

The USDA’s Broadcast Media & Technology Center<\/a> (BMTC), “with its $2.8 million annual budget, is ‘one of the most effective public relations operations inside the federal government,’ the New York Times<\/em> concluded in its March 2005 expos”<\/a> on government VNRs,” according to Diane Farsetta<\/a>, who also reported:<\/p>\n

The 13 radio ANRs produced on CAFTA in early 2005 are, if anything, even more one-sided. One proclaims CAFTA to be “part of the new world order for trade.” As the piece ends, the “reporter” enthuses that CAFTA “would be very good news for America’s farmers.” The only CAFTA opponent mentioned in any ANR is the sugar industry. The most frequently used phrase to describe CAFTA is “level playing field.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fake news hasn’t been the only trick used by the gov’t to win public support. According to<\/a> NPR<\/em>, “the U.S. Department of Labor hid studies detailing poor working conditions in Central American countries.” U.S. Representative Sander Levin (D-MI) has posted the survey<\/a>, which was pulled from the survey contractor’s website last year, when the Bush administration decided the findings weren’t to their liking. Levin was forced to use the FOIA to gain access to it. <\/p>\n

Fri, Mar. 11, 2005<\/u>
\nState ag directors whack CAFTA, White House<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

“But my big problem with it,” Scuse notes, “is that CAFTA countries get access to U.S. food markets now and our access to theirs is phased in over 10, 15 and 20 years. For instance, their poultry tariffs won’t be fully lifted for 17 to 20 years. That doesn’t look like fair trade to poultry growers.”<\/p>\n

His point is even sharper if U.S. farmers view the trade pact as the White House views it: CAFTA is a small but necessary stepping stone to bigger trade bridges like the hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas and Doha’s worldwide ag deal.<\/p>\n

The trouble with that trade double-shot, however, is that if future treaties follow CAFTA – U.S. domestic markets first; U.S. foreign markets years later – nations like Brazil, Russia and India will become food exporting powerhouses to both the U.S. and the world while American farmers become calendar watchers.<\/p>\n

Truth is, we already are. As former Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman loved to remind anyone who would listen, the U.S. has the lowest ag import trade tariffs in the world, 12 percent, yet faces the highest ag import tariffs, 60 percent, around the world.<\/p>\n

Veneman, however, never revealed the reason behind that disparity – we disarmed. We agreed to lower our tariffs; they never did.<\/p>\n

More importantly, says Scuse, deals like CAFTA institutionalize the disparities for years and decades to come. “Short-term there won’t be any benefits in CAFTA for our farmers. At least none that I see.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Farmers in Central America are not impressed.<\/p>\n

CAFTA Deserves a Quiet Death<\/strong>
\nBy Mark Engler
\nPublished on June 20, 2005<\/a><\/p>\n

Why has a wide range of forces allied against CAFTA? Because it’s a bad deal for people in this country and for Central Americans alike. <\/p>\n

CAFTA’s supporters argue that it would help reduce poverty among our southern neighbors. The track record of NAFTA, however, doesn’t support their optimism. While the earlier trade accord did draw high-paying U.S. production jobs to Mexico, real wages in Mexico’s manufacturing sector actually decreased by 13.5 percent between 1994 and 2000, according to the International Monetary Fund. <\/p>\n

One reason for this decline was the failure of NAFTA to protect workers’ rights to organize unions. In practice, the panel established by the agreement’s labor “side agreement” has failed to impose any real penalties for countries or corporations even in the most egregious cases of abuse. For its part, CAFTA weakens the labor standards put in place by the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act of 2000, which includes the CAFTA nations. The new deal holds countries accountable only to their own local labor laws, which are often less comprehensive than internationally recognized standards. <\/p>\n

The U.S. Trade Representative’s presentation of CAFTA as a tool for exporting democracy is also highly suspect. CAFTA effectively extends NAFTA’s notorious Chapter 11, which allows companies to challenge any law that infringes on their ability to procure future profits. This provision has been used to strike down environmental and public health laws, labeling them unfair “trade barriers.” In this manner, democratically made decisions–including U.S. laws–become subject to review by the trade courts. <\/p>\n

If CAFTA is not very democratic, it not very “free” either. Some of the main beneficiaries in the U.S. are likely to be large pharmaceutical companies. CAFTA’s intellectual property provisions would stop poorer countries in the region from producing inexpensive, generic drugs. Dr. Karim Laouabdia of the Nobel-prize-winning organization Doctors Without Borders–which has been providing generic antiretrovirals to Guatemalan AIDS patients–argues that new patent protections “could make newer medicines unaffordable.” For his group, this “means treating fewer people and, in effect, sentencing the rest to death.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mark Engler highlighted one of the major flaws in CAFTA<\/a> last year when he reported that Harken Energy was suing Costa Rica for $57 billion in damages for enforcing their own environmental laws.<\/p>\n

For opponents of CAFTA, the Harken case is a paradigmatic example of how corporations use international agreements to bully countries into dropping environmental protections. CAFTA’s investor protections, which are similar to NAFTA’s notorious Chapter 11, allow companies to bring complaints directly to international tribunals. Under the new agreement, Costa Rica would not be able to rebuff efforts to bypass its national courts. Instead, it would have to allow deliberations about Harken’s astronomical $57 billion “compensation claim” to move forward on the international level.<\/p>\n

Regardless of whether such corporate claims are upheld, the threat of a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit is enough to persuade many developing countries to back down on enforcing their environmental laws. The example of NAFTA shows that even powerful countries are susceptible to what activists dub environmental “blackmail.” In one famous 1998 case, the Ethyl Corporation sued Canada over its public health ban on MMT, a fuel additive. Canada chose to overturn its environmental provision and pay $13 million to Ethyl rather than risk $251 million in damages.<\/p>\n

With such cases on record, Australia refused to include a provision in its trade agreement with the U.S. that would let investors bypass national courts and take disputes to international bodies. But that’s something poorer nations, who feel they cannot afford to risk losing access to U.S. markets, do not have the power to do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Stop CAFTA<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are sugar producers being used by the Bush administration to push through CAFTA? During the last election, “Sugar gave about the same amount of money to federal politicians as did the dairy industry which is 10 times larger,” according to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-fp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}