Adapted from a photograph of an anti-WTO banner hung during the WTO talks in Seattle, 1999
Welcome to the online version of "Fighting FTAs: the growing resistance to bilateral free trade and investment agreements", a collaborative publication released by bilaterals.org, BIOTHAI and GRAIN in February 2008. "Fighting FTAs" provides a big picture of what today’s frenzy over free trade agreements (FTAs) means, and an insight into some of the struggles being waged by social movements fighting back.
Hardly a day goes by without news of some FTA hitting the headlines. Global talks at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) have been going nowhere for some time. In the meanwhile, big powers like the US, the EU and others are using a range of tools to force other countries to conform to their gameplan of political and economic domination. Negotiated behind closed doors, FTAs are a very effective means to realign global power relations.
FTAs hit hard. On the one hand, they push countries deeper into neoliberalism — guaranteeing freedom for transnational corporations to do what they want, wherever they want, regardless of the human and ecological costs. The comprehensiveness and depth of many of today’s FTAs often go much further than the WTO. Typically, they cover a huge array of issues and targets, from giving corporations the right to sue governments in Southeast Asia, to legalising the dumping of American farm surpluses in Central America to raising the cost of life-saving medicines, through longer patent terms, in North Africa.
On the other hand, FTAs lock countries into new political alliances at a time of tense competition for control over natural resources (oil, water, land), labour, new technologies and markets. But while economic and geopolitical power are at the heart of the FTA frenzy, they are not just a tool of old North-South relations. Many so-called developing countries have joined the FTA bandwagon to cut open new markets and investment deals between each other — with the same neoliberal drive.
But FTAs are being strongly resisted in many countries around the world. Ever since the North America Free Trade Agreement came into being 15 years ago, social movements have been fighting these deals tooth and nail, and pushing forward their own strategies to defend food sovereignty, public services, biodiversity, controls on trade and investment, people-based forms of regional integration, etc.
This website contains the full text of the "Fighting FTAs" publication and more — photographs, audio clips, videos, a few additional texts, an interactive map, etc. It does not pretend to be a complete guide to what is going on to stop FTAs around the world. But it does offer some important accounts of these struggles, from the perspective of people and groups engaged in local movements to resist and oppose these powerful new deals.