U.S.-Peru Free Trade -- Updated Analysis

November 19, 2007

The lobbying prior to the House passage of the Peru Free Trade Agreement 285-132 was intense and heated.  Understandably, the Republicans overwhelmingly approved.  But what is of note is the division among  the Democrats – 116 opposed, 109 for and 8 not voting, and this despite the fact that the Democratic House leadership strongly supported and pushed for passage of Peru FTA, thus giving the Bush Administration what it sought, another NAFTA-cloned trade agreement. Why?

The House leadership’s campaign for passage followed their success in crafting an agreement with the Bush Administration to renegotiate and strengthen provisions within the trade agreement related to labor, environment and access to medicines. Laudable as this may appear, the labor laws in the new trade bill will not be changed through legislative action in Peru. Nor will U.S. workers be safe from off-shoring.

Nor do investment provisions of the pact protect the ecological, medicinal and cultural heritage of indigenous people. As noted by Jessica Walker Beaumont of the American Friends Service Committee: “This trade pact opens the way for large pharmaceuticals and agribusiness corporations to patent traditional knowledge, seeds and life forms…to  bio-piracy of the Andean-Amazon region.” 

Another possible effect of the FTA on the Peruvian people is also highly significant. Some 700,000 small rural Peruvian farmers will be in danger of losing their markets as U.S. agricultural corporations process and export cheap agricultural products with which they cannot compete. A major question for U.S. citizens: Where do people who lose their farms relocate?  Remember NAFTA’s disruption of Mexican farmers?

Such trade agreements are not worthy of this nation.  Like all NAFTA-cloned agreements, the eventual winners are a few wealthy investors and multinational corporations. And what is amazingly ironic as this Peru FTA moves to the Senate is that the President has again promised another of his succession of vetoes, this time of the Trade Adjustment Assistance for Americans Act which would increase benefits for those who lose their jobs to trade.   

Now to the Senate, sometime after Thanksgiving.