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Top Ten Reasons to Oppose CAFTA |
| A short piece that explains why the Central American Free Trade Agreement is bad for you! | ||
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Central Americans Speak Out on CAFTA |
| A concise look at how CAFTA would affect Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, and how social movements in those countries have mobilized against CAFTA . | ||
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Food Security, Farming and CAFTA |
| Corporate globalization is responsible for the loss of land, the loss of income, and the exposure to unsafe food and unhealthy working conditions for millions of people worldwide. It has severely exacerbated the risk of hunger and starvation, and caused the general erosion of rural communities and biodiversity across the globe. CAFTA follows the same model, and threatens the lives of 5 million farmers in Central America. | ||
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Environmental Impacts of CAFTA |
| CAFTA threatens global biodiversity, would accelerate the spread of genetically modified food, increase natural resource exploitation, further degrade some of the most critical environmental regions on the planet, and erode the public’s ability to protect our planet for future generations. | ||
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CAFTA's Assault on Basic Services |
| CAFTA threatens privatization of Nicaragua's water, El Salvador's health care, Costa Rican telecommunications, and many more aspects of our daily lives. | ||
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CAFTA and the Scourge of Sweatshops |
| "Free trade" agreements that are supposed to increase the global standard of living actually undermine it – through lowering workers’ wages, eroding workers’ rights, increasing unemployment, and creating a global ‘race to the bottom’ that pits workers against each other instead of promoting global worker solidarity. | ||
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The Dangerous Expansion of Corporate Rights in CAFTA |
| Ten years of experience with NAFTA has shown that trade agreements which grant unrestrained rights to corporations are devastating to the public interest. Yet the wheels are in motion to enact CAFTA, an agreement that would further threaten democracy by granting additional rights to giant multinational corporations. | ||
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Signed in May, 2004 by the governments of the US, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and El Salvador, CAFTA will extend many of the most dangerous provisions of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) throughout Central America and the Caribbean. The Dominican Republic was added late 2004.
The bill must still be signed by President Bush. It has been approved by Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic have yet to ratify it.
Community groups, unions and farmer federations throughout Central America have been speaking out against provisions in CAFTA that would further expose their agricultural sectors to dumping by U.S. agribusiness and impede the ability of governments to ensure that any new trade deal serves development priorities.
After years of experience with the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the people of Central America know all-too-well the impact of neo-liberal policies on farmers and the working poor. Following the advice of the World Bank and the IMF, these countries opened their markets to U.S. agriculture products. The flood of cheap, U.S. government-subsidized foods has driven thousands of family farmers off their lands and into urban slums where the only opportunities are sweatshop jobs, begging and street crime.
CAFTA will exacerbate this situation by locking these countries into dangerous policies that undermine their governments' ability to protect food security, workers rights, and public services such as water, healthcare and education. CAFTA makes it impossible for nations to ensure that foreign investment serves development goals.