This document addresses the major topics on the official agenda of current trade negotiations (investment, finance, intellectual property rights, agriculture, market access, services, and dispute resolution), as well as issues that are of extreme social importance but which governments have ignored (human rights, sustainability, environment, labor, immigration, the role of the state, and gender). They should be considered as a complete package of proposals for positive economic integration.
December 2002
sponsored by the
Hemispheric Social Alliance
http://www.asc-hsa.org/
Download updated Chapter on Gender
This paper draws upon the contributions of many individuals too numerous to name. Over the course of many years, hundreds of people have participated in discussions, helped draft documents or conducted educational organizing activities around an alternative vision for our hemisphere. To a large extent, this paper is a culmination of all of these efforts. In preparing this fourth version of Alternatives for the Americas, international teams were set up to coordinate input around each chapter. The participants in those teams circulated drafts by email and met in various countries to discuss their respective proposals. The following individuals were the coordinators of their respective teams:
Javier Mujica, Plataforma Interamericana de Derechos Humanos y Democracia
Hilda Salazar and Alejandro Villamar, RMALC, Gabrielle
Pelletier, RQIC, Sergio Schlesinger, REBRIP
Sergio Schlesinger, REBRIP
Marceline White, Women's Edge/ART, Rosa Guillen, Mujeres Transformando la Economía
Alberto Arroyo, UAM/RMALC, Peter Bakvis, International Confederation of Free Trade Unions
Juan Manuel Sandoval, RMALC, Claire Picard, RQIC
Alberto Arroyo, UAM/RMALC
Jocelyn Berthelot, Centrale des syndicats du Québec/RQIC
Elvira Truglia, AMARC/RQIC
John Dillon, KAIROS: Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives/Common Frontiers (Canada)
John Dillon, KAIROS /Common Frontiers (Canada)
Alejandra Rotania, Ser Mulher/Rede Brasileira pela Integracão dos Povos (REBRIP), Kristin Dawkins, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy/ART
Stephen Bartlett, Agricultural Missions/ART
Miosotis Rivas Peña, Centro de Investigación Económica para el Caribe (CIECA) and Andrés Peñaloza, RMALC
Claudio Lara, Consumers International/Alianza Chilena por un Comercio Justo y Responsable
Terry Collingsworth, International Labor Rights Fund/ART
The individuals responsible for the overall coordination and editing of this document include:
Other people who made important contributions include: Victor Baez, ORIT; Gonzalo Berrón (REBRIP); Diana Bronson (Rights and Democracy); Raúl Moreno (Red Sinti Techan); Kathy Ozer (National Family Farm Coalition); David Ranney (ART) and Marcela Escribano (RQIC), and the translators: Maria Eugenia Gutierrez; Natalie Mariona; Jacobo Menajovsky; Keyllen Nieto; Dan Thomas; and Marco Velazquez.
We would also like to express our appreciation to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Solidago Foundation, whose generous support made the translation and publication of this document possible.
The Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA) brings together a broad range of organizations from throughout the Americas united by the conviction that any form of economic integration among our nations must serve first and foremost to promote equitable and sustainable development for all of our peoples. The members of the HSA, whether labor unions or environmentalists, family farmers or scholars, indigenous people or women, have been working for years to oppose the implementation of so-called neoliberal policies in our respective countries. In addition to our shared critique of the negative impacts of that model, we are united by our conviction that we must move forward with both feet, combining protest with proposal, developing a common vision about what an alternative form of integration might look like. This document expresses our determination to construct an alternative to the dominant integration model based on the proposals described herein.
The Hemispheric Social Alliance rejects the extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the rest of the hemisphere, as well as any accords based on the neoliberal model. We will oppose any agreement drafted along those lines. At the same time, we see the defeat of freetrade agreements as only the first step. We refuse to accept a status quo that continues to marginalize vast sectors of our populations and to degrade our environments. Driving our collective work on alternatives is the sense that the neo-liberal economic model has been a disaster for most of the peoples of the hemisphere, and because of that we must deliberate, propose and struggle for a different model.
Peasants whose labor once fed their nations and themselves are forced to export risky "cash crops" to bring in foreign currency and to provide the well-to-do in the North with meat and fresh produce throughout the year. At the same time, local markets have been flooded with subsidized agricultural products from the North, leading them to bankruptcy. This has resulted in hunger for many and reduced food quality for others, and has driven hundreds of thousands of small farmers from their lands.
This growing export dependency has added to the plight of landless peasants, particularly in countries where the ownership of the bulk of agricultural land is concentrated in a small number of hands. In Brazil, for example, despite decades-long promises of land reform, one percent of land owners control 44 percent of the lands. In recent years private militias and police have killed several hundred landless peasants participating in peaceful occupations of idle or underused lands belonging to wealthy landowners.
With the decline of subsistence agriculture, young women and indigenous peoples have often been forced into our hemisphere's export processing zones, particularly in Mexico and Central America. Paid less than a living wage, they are forced to live in squalor and often subjected to sexual harassment. Long working hours strain their family ties and limit their educational opportunities.
Peasants forced to abandon their lands sometimes come to cities in the hemisphere to seek work. But what many find is unemployment and poverty and a life in the "informal economy," since a great deal of domestic manufacturing has been eliminated by the penetration of transnational corporations and rules that block efforts to strengthen the domestic economy.
Other displaced peasants come north and are met by the militarization of the U.S. border with Mexico, new laws that violate their civil and labor rights, and racist hysteria promoted by right-wing politicians and their constituencies.
The substitution of subsistence farming with agriculture export production has also had serious impacts on local environments and standards of living. It threatens biodiversity and water and soil quality and neither benefits nor respects farmers' or consumers' interests and rights.
Neo-liberal rules to deregulate capital markets, combined with new telecommunications technologies, have opened our nations to the vagaries of hot money. Speculators pull their money in and out of our nations at will, leaving misery in their wake as usurious interest rates and currency devaluations slash the buying power of our wages and drastically reduce opportunities for livable wage work. Argentina is the latest nation to undergo a devastating economic crisis caused in part by the privatization and deregulation of financial markets permitting massive capital flight.
U.S. and Canadian workers have felt the pain of the elimination of hundreds of thousands of livingwage manufacturing jobs. Many have been unable to find comparable work, and their sons and daughters are facing the prospect of either no work at all or jobs that are temporary or part time with pay below what it takes to live a decent life in these countries.
In the United States and Canada, the governments are abandoning public housing subsidies as the ranks of the homeless soar. This has had a disproportionate effect on women, especially poor women. Public funds for basic subsistence living - food, clothing and medical care - programs won by workers' struggles of the past, are being eliminated, and people are told to find non-existent jobs. Meanwhile in both the United States and Canada, the reduction in fiscal deficits is further straining workers and the poor as programs in health care, education and public transportation are privatized, eliminated or seriously cut back.
Throughout the hemisphere, there is a stratum of society that is doing very well by neo-liberal policies. Speculators, transnational corporations and those in their service proclaim the wonders of the market. Those sectors, however, never let their rhetorical commitment to free trade limit their demands for special protections for their own particular interests, as evidenced by the recent debate on Trade Promotion Authority in the U.S. Congress, as well as the dramatic increase in agricultural subsidies to corporate agriculture. But for most of us, the past 25 years have meant declining living standards and in many cases abject poverty.
Neoliberalism entails the imposition of a set of rules that govern not only the economy but also the social fabric of our societies. The issue for us, therefore, is not one of free trade vs. protection or integration vs. isolation, but whose rules will prevail and who will benefit from those rules.
This struggle against the neoliberal model, as expressed in the struggle against free-trade agreements, has been going on for some time. It began with the fight against NAFTA's approval and advocacy efforts to change the characteristics of the Mercosur. A turning point was reached in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 1997, when the ORIT unions and their Brazilian affiliate, the CUT, convened a meeting of union leaders from the Americas to which they invited the national multisectoral networks that had been working on the issue. Other civil-society networks were also meeting in the city at that time to discuss the same issues. We ended up working together and decided to join forces to initiate the formation of a great hemispheric social alliance that would involve all sectors of the population affected by this model. The decision was made to convene the First Summit of the Peoples of the Americas the following year. Various committees were established for that purpose, among them an international committee that prepared a draft on alternatives that became the first version of the document presented here.
It was a time of momentous decisions and meetings by hundreds of organizations from many sectors. It is important, however, to highlight the role of multisectoral coalitions in some countries that had been working together for years in a spirit of unity and consensus to defeat free trade agreements. Their experience and years of unified struggle were vital in the development of the nature and forms of struggle that came to define for the Hemispheric Social Alliance. These include to Common Frontiers (Canada), the Quebec Network on Hemispheric Integration, the Alliance for Responsible Trade (United States) and the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade -- which were already organized as a trinational network -- as well as the Chilean Alliance for Just and Responsible Trade (formerly the Chilean Network for a Peoples' Initiative). These multisectoral networks, together with the soon-to-be formed Brazilian Network for a Peoples' Integration, as well as the hemispheric coordinators of the labor sector (ORIT) and the peasant sector (CLOC), formed the initial nucleus that began the formation of the Hemispheric Social Alliance and its Alternative proposals.
The first Peoples' Summit, held in Santiago, Chile, in April 1998 parallel to the second official Summit of heads of state of the Americas, highlighted the fact that there is a growing movement of resistance. This has emerged even more forcefully during the enormous mobilizations that led to the failure of the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999 and at virtually every gathering of official policymakers since then. This global effort against neoliberal globalization also takes on the unified spirit of mobilization and the search for alternatives that characterized the meetings convened by the Zapatistas in the Chiapas jungle. This enormous, unified movement is one of people telling those political leaders, financial speculators and the transnational corporations who promote neoliberal policies that their agenda is unacceptable. It is a movement of people demanding their very humanity. They do so by stating that nutritious food, a comfortable place to live, a clean and healthy environment, health care and education are human rights. And they declare that respect for the rights of workers, women, indigenous peoples, black peoples and Latinos living in the United States and Canada must be central to any process of integration.
Supporters of neoliberalism are attempting to counter the resistance of the peoples of the Americas in a number of ways. In the United States, corporate giants have launched a massive propaganda campaign to "educate" the public on the benefits of free trade. In many countries, an extreme response has been to utilize the nation state as an instrument of terror against its own peoples. Under the guise of a "war on drugs", counter-insurgency efforts such as the Plan Colombia have become a plague in our hemisphere. Furthermore, the suppression of popular movements throughout Mexico, Central and South America is an attempt to limit our nations' demands.
History teaches many things. One lesson can be found in the words of the great African-American emancipator, Frederick Douglass,
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress...Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will...Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found the exact measure of injustice and wrong."
Another lesson of history is that no amount of oppression can stop people from declaring their own humanity and acting on that declaration.
The first Peoples' Summit did not end with the negation of the neo-liberal rules; it was the beginning of a dialogue on alternatives. Earlier versions of this document were based on those talks. Our proposals have been enriched by continuous discussions at numerous seminars and meetings during the development of the Hemispheric Social Alliance. Those talks continued at the Second Peoples' Summit in Quebec, Canada in 2001, where more than 3,000 representatives of civil-society groups from throughout the hemisphere met to challenge the FTAA and to promote alternatives.
This new version of Alternatives for the Americas is the product of that continuing dialogue and is thus rooted in the aspirations of the peoples of our hemisphere to live and develop as full human beings. Alternatives for the Americas is an integrated proposal for an alternative vision of equitable and sustainable development for our societies. We firmly believe that the mere incorporation of one or more aspects or chapters from this document into the FTAA or similar accords would not resolve the fundamental problems of free trade.
The aspiration to build a more egalitarian and respectful society throughout the hemisphere transcends national boundaries and has a long historical tradition in the Americas. It goes back at least as far as the struggles to create free and independent countries in the American hemisphere. Almost two centuries ago Simón Bolivar, who led the movement to liberate a large part of South America from colonialism, declared:
"I wish, more than anything else, to witness the creation in America of the greatest nation in the world, not so much because of its immense territory or wealth, but rather because of its freedom and glory."
"Alternatives for the Americas" is not solely an economic doctrine, but is rather an approach to social integration through which the ideas, talents and wealth of all of our peoples can be shared to our mutual benefit. It is a living document that will be altered and expanded as we exercise our rights to continue the debate and discussion.
This document addresses the major topics on the official agenda of current trade negotiations (investment, finance, intellectual property rights, agriculture, market access, services, and dispute resolution), as well as issues that are of extreme social importance but which governments have ignored (human rights, sustainability, environment, labor, immigration, the role of the state, and gender). They should be considered as a complete package of proposals for positive economic integration.
Trade and investment should not be ends in themselves, but rather the instruments for achieving just and sustainable development. Citizens must have the right to participate in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of hemispheric social and economic policies. Central goals of these policies should be to promote economic sovereignty, social welfare, and reduced inequality at all levels.
A common human rights agenda should form the overall framework for all hemispheric policies, and include mechanisms and institutions to ensure full implementation and enforcement. This agenda should promote the broadest definition of human rights, covering civil, political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights, gender equity, and rights relating to indigenous peoples and communities.
Governments should subordinate trade and investment to policies that prioritize sustainability and environmental protection. They should also have the power to channel investment to environmentally sustainable activities, reject privatization of natural resources, eliminate policies that subsidize or encourage the use of fossil fuel energy, and use the precautionary principle in setting public policies. Natural resources must be used to serve people's basic needs, not simply as an object of market transactions.
A regional model for sustainable and democratic development requires the incorporation of the principle and objective of sustainability in all of the subjects addressed. These issues should be negotiated with the objective of resolving - with the support of national policies - our region's grave social problems, including inequality, unemployment, and environmental degradation. The agreements must commit the member countries to comply with international treaties and conventions designed to protect the environment, minorities, workers' rights, women's rights and other social conquests. They should also provide practical measures designed to make those agreements effective at a national level.
International conventions on women's rights should be central to all hemispheric policies. Women should have greater opportunities to participate in policy-making. Governments should also establish national laws to ensure affordable child care; address workplace sexual harassment; and implement the UN 20/20 initiative to allocate 20 percent of budgets to social programs. Women should have equal access to credit, education and other resources.
Hemispheric policies should guarantee the basic rights of working men and women, create a fund to provide compensation to workers and communities suffering job losses, and promote the improvement of working and living standards of workers and their families.
Governments should adhere to international conventions on migrants' rights; ensure labor rights for all workers-regardless of immigration status-and severely penalize employers that violate these rights; grant amnesty to all undocumented workers within their borders; demilitarize border zones; and support international subsidies for areas that are major exporters of labor.
Hemispheric policies should not undermine the ability of the nation state to meet its citizens' social and economic needs. Nation states should have the right to maintain public sector corporations and procurement policies that support national development goals. The goal of national regulations on the private sector should be to ensure that economic activities promote fair and sustainable development.
Education is not a commodity; it is a universal and fundamental social right that should be ensured through publicly funded services and should be the responsibility of the State. It should be excluded from agreements on the liberalization of services. Public education should be free and fully accessible in all areas and throughout people's lifetimes.
The right to communications is the right to produce and send, as well as to receive information. Communications should be considered a public good and should be preserved and regulated for society's social and cultural benefit. Communications and mass media should be guided by ethical principles inspired by a culture of life and humanity.
Investment should generate high-quality jobs, sustainable production, and economic stability. Governments should have the right to screen out investments that make no net contribution to development, especially speculative capital flows. Citizens groups and all levels of government should have the right to sue investors that violate investment rules. The NAFTA mechanism that allows investors to sue governments directly should be abolished and banned from other agreements.
100% of all debts of low-income countries and the illegitimate debts of middle-income countries should be canceled. Highly indebted countries should have their debts reduced in order to avoid crises in their balance of payments, pressures to exploit natural resources unsustainably and the other negative economic, social and environmental consequences that result from efforts to service debts that have already been paid. World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs must be abandoned, and those institutions either fundamentally restructured or replaced. Countries should be allowed to impose controls on capital flows and a multilateral mechanism should be developed to regulate speculative activity. Governments should have the power to establish their own monetary and financial policies and resist dollarization.
Governments should have the power to establish intellectual property rules that reflect their specific social, cultural and economic contexts. This should include the right to provisions to guarantee access to essential drugs and protect biodiversity, indigenous knowledge, and traditional and farming communities. All life forms should be excluded from patentability.
Countries should assume the responsibility to ensure that their populations have food. Governments should have the right to protect or exclude staple foods from trade agreements. There should be a democratization of decisionmaking on agricultural, fishery and environmental polices, and especially land reform policy, that fully involves small-scale farmers. No element of any international integration agreement should limit the ability of the nation state to promote and consolidate that process.
Developing countries should work with developed countries to implement special policies to address the inequalities between our countries. The current dominant principle of "national treatment," which requires governments to treat foreign investors and products no less favorably than domestic ones, severely restricts national development planning. Governments should be allowed to pursue policies to strengthen domestic demand rather than relying entirely on external markets. Government must have sovereign rights to provide subsidies and fiscal incentives to productive services that reflect legitimate social interests.
Basic services such as education, health care, energy, water and other utilities should be available to all people throughout the hemisphere. In order to reach this goal, those public services should not be privatized or left to the forces of so-called market rules. Countries should promote national development interests and prioritize environmental and other social concerns above the goal of efficient resource allocation. Governments must also develop and maintain the technical and institutional capacity to effectively regulate services.
If the proposed policies are to be meaningful, they must be accompanied by dispute resolution and enforcement mechanisms that are focused on reducing inequalities and based on fair and democratic processes. These should be designed to create sufficient incentives to encourage compliance so that enforcement actions can be avoided. This would involve an assessment of compliance in each country, action plans to address obstacles to compliance, and, as a last resort, the withholding of trade agreement benefits for corporate violators and/or governments with a record of pervasive non-enforcement.
No country can nor should remain isolated from the global economy. This does not mean, however, that the current free market approach to globalization is the only, much less the best, form of economic integration. The dynamics of the world economy are a reality that must be taken into account in any effort to develop a national development plan if the programs proposed are to be viable and sustainable. We refuse, however, to permit the world economy to define, with our governments' consent, the future of our countries and our peoples. We must democratically construct sustainable national development plans in our countries and, starting from that point, insert ourselves into the world economy.
This dominant free market approach (embodied in the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Trade Organization, and the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investment) argues that the global market on its own will allocate and develop the best possibilities for each country. According to this view, it is unnecessary for us to envision the kind of nation we want to be or could be. We only need to eliminate all obstacles to global trade, and the market itself will take on the task of offering us the best of all possible worlds.
The difference between this dominant approach and the alternative vision presented in this document lies not in whether we accept the opening of our economies to trade. The two fundamental differences are the following: 1) whether to have a national plan we can fight for or let the market determine the plan, and 2) whether capital, especially speculative capital, should be subject to international regulation. The recent trend has been to allow all capital, even speculative capital, free rein, and let the world follow capital's interests. History has demonstrated that the market on its own does not generate development, let alone social justice. In contrast, we propose a world economy regulated at the national and supra-national levels in the interest of peace, democracy, sustainable development and economic stability at the national as well as international levels.
Our position in this regard is very clear: we cannot remain on the sidelines but must claim our role as valid stakeholders in the globalization dialogue. We must refuse to accept the current neo-liberal form of globalization as irreversible. We must not only reduce its negative consequences, but put forward a positive alternative.
As citizens of the Americas, we refuse to be ruled by the law of supply and demand and claim our role as individuals rather than simple commodities governed by the laws of the market.
Free trade has produced only social and economic exclusion. This has resulted in the creation of a social stratum of citizens devalued by the current economic system and the society that supports it. Exclusion renders people unable to enter or re-enter the economic circuit. The inability to reintegrate leads to a process of social "disqualification" and the loss of active citizenship. Anyone who has felt the negative effects of the transition to free trade has become chronically unemployed or whose job is precarious, lives and knows this exclusion.
We are not opposed to the establishment of rules for regional or international trade and investment. Nor does our criticism of the dominant, externally imposed form of globalization imply a wish to return to the past, to close our economies and establish protectionist barriers, or to press for isolationist trade policies. But the current rules have not helped our countries overcome, nor even reduce, our economic problems. We propose alternative rules to regulate the global and hemispheric economies that are based on a different economic logic: that trade and investment should not be ends in themselves, but rather tools for achieving just and sustainable development. Our proposal also promotes a social logic that includes areas such as labor, human rights, the environment, and minorities--that is, previously excluded issues and people.
While our critique and proposal have a technical basis, they also spring from an ethical imperative. We refuse to accept the market as a god that controls our lives. We do not accept the inevitability of a model of globalization that excludes more than half of the world's population from the benefits of development. We do not accept that environmental degradation is the inevitable and necessary evil accompanying growth. Behind the neoliberal economic measures lies not just a political and economic strategy but an unacceptable underlying conception of the human being and a culture that must be eliminated.
A profound ethical imperative pushes us to propose our own model of society, one supported by the many men and women united in hope for a more just and humane society for themselves and future generations.
The democratization of debates and decision making is a necessary precondition, but is not sufficient in itself for the development of new just and sustainable rules on investment, environment, and labor that takes citizens' interests into account. Democracy by itself does not ensure social welfare; clear and viable economic and social proposals must be developed based on consensus and public support. In addition, democracy must not be reduced to an electoral issue. The democratisation of decision making on fundamental economic and social issues is imperative. Citizens must not only approve economic and social policies, but also participate in their formulation, implementation, and evaluation. They must be able to change or modify these policies when appropriate. In order to achieve this objective it may be necessary to implement special initiatives to ensure that marginalized or oppressed groups, among them women, have access to these debates.
Global corporations have grown so large that they can no longer be effectively controlled by our governments. We need new instruments to reassert public control and citizen sovereignty over these firms.
The political stability needed for sustainable development requires that agreements on economic integration include mechanisms to ensure democratic security. Stability should be based on democratic participation and not on coercion. Any agreement should promote democracy in the Americas, without being interventionist in internal affairs. Democratic and non-coercive security entails civilian monitoring (accountable to citizens) of the forces of law and order. Civilian control is required, for example, to halt the arms race and the militarization of broad areas of the Americas that is currently being conducted under the pretext of fighting arms and drug trafficking and drug production.
International democratization requires reform of United Nations institutions, including the Security Council, as well as international banking and trade institutions. The reforms must be based on consultations in every country and should be oriented to serving humankind's objectives: sustainable development and democracy and peace based on justice and respect for human dignity. Such institutions should not continue to be the tools of large multinational corporations and nuclear powers. The democratization of the world and inter-American system must also stop the exclusion of countries for ideological or political reasons, as is currently the case with Cuba.
All integration agreements must ensure that the defense and promotion of human rights, taken in the broadest sense, is also globalized. That is, not only civil and political rights and individual protections should be included, but also the collective rights of peoples and their communities: economic, social, cultural, and environmental. Special attention should be given to the rights of indigenous communities and peoples, and mechanisms put in place to eliminate all forms of discrimination and the oppression of women.
The rules flowing from agreements should preserve the power of individual countries to set high standards of living, valuing dignified work, the creation of enough good jobs, healthy communities, and a clean environment within their borders. There should be no limitations on the sovereignty of states, provinces or localities.
In today's world, economic sovereignty, stability and social welfare require making productive economic activities a priority, while discouraging speculative investment and regulating the free flow of footloose capital. Corporate interests should not undermine our countries' economic sovereignty.
Economic integration should represent a commitment to improve the quality of life for all. Our countries should not be promoted on the basis of low wages, systematic discrimination against women or other groups, lack of social protections or lax enforcement. National competitiveness cannot be rooted in the deterioration of standard of living and/or the environment. Equalization of standards should be achieved through upward harmonization. Trade and integration accords, as wells as domestic economic policies, should include social objectives, time tables, indicators of social impact and corrective remedies.
National governments must protect local efforts aimed at achieving viable, economically sustainable and food self-sufficient communities, both urban and rural.
Giving priority to social welfare in international agreements means reducing military budgets and allocating resources to people's education and health. Money saved through military reductions in powerful nations should be channelled toward an international war on poverty.
Combating drug production, trafficking and consumption should be an element of integration accords. Rather than taking a purely military approach, however, this should be achieved through mass educational campaigns, the elimination of the poverty driving this lucrative business, fighting against corruption and the involvement in the drug trade of high-level authorities, and other measures aimed at the root causes of the problem. International agreements must preserve the sovereignty of nation states over domestic matters and in the application of their own laws. They should not allow for the presence of armed troops or foreign police forces within the borders of a sovereign nation.
A main objective of any agreement should be the reduction of inequalities within and among nations, between women and men, and among races.
a) Among nations: The rush toward the integration of highly unequal economies without social protections is creating a climate in which large corporations can reduce the standard of living and wages in all regions of the world. The new rules should include mechanisms to reduce imbalances among nations through raising living standards in the poorest countries. This would not only be a step toward meeting the demands for justice and equity in these countries. It would also reduce the power of corporations to take advantage of such inequalities to weaken standards and wages everywhere by threatening to move production to areas where labor costs and environmental protections are lower.
b) Within nations: Inequalities and extreme poverty have been increasing for more than a decade in the Americas. The new rules should reduce these inequalities, encouraging redistribution of income, land and natural resources.
c) Between women and men and among races: Women, people of color and indigenous peoples have had to shoulder a disproportionate share of the economic and social decline caused by neo-liberal policy. Cuts in public-sector services and jobs, together with the reduction in stable jobs and democratic structures, have hit women harder than men and girls harder than boys. In times of scarcity, the decisions made by families and society tend to favor men, whether consciously or not. Moreover, women's responsibilities increase, since they are traditionally responsible for care of the family, when family members lose access to jobs or programs funded by the state. This is one more burden added to the other forms of discrimination women confront on the economic, legal, social and political spheres in the hemisphere. Discrimination must be ended by implementing new strategies and economic models to reverse the impacts of current policies. Countries must respect international agreements designed to achieve equity. At the same time there should be social programs and the intensification of international cooperation toward this end.
a) The decision to work for sustainable and democratic regional integration requires the incorporation of those principles and objectives into all of the issues that comprise an agreement on integration: trade; investment; services, etc. Those issues must be negotiated with the specific objective of resolving, with the support of national policies, our region's serious social problems: inequality; unemployment; environmental degradation; poverty and many other issues.
b) Any integration agreement should commit the member countries to comply with international treaties and conventions designed to protect the environment, minorities, workers' rights and other social conquests. It should also provide practical means for the implementation of measures at the regional level. Consequently, nothing in such agreements should contradict those global treaties or conventions.
c) The contents of these agreements, especially on matters related to trade, investment and financial and technological assistance, should include mechanisms that prioritize domestic production of goods and services necessary for the population's basic needs. Instead of stimulating the production of superfluous consumer goods produced by large transnational corporations or of monocrop exports, they should protect production oriented primarily to the domestic market, whether industrial, craft, or from family-farms. In this regard, the preservation of cultural patterns of local consumption should be the object of special attention and protection.
d) In order to achieve sustainability, there must be progressive reductions in exports of goods intensive in natural resources and energy, whose production degrades the environment in the Americas, especially among its poorest populations.
In virtue of international law and, in particular, the Charter of the United Nations, Charter of the Organization of American States, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, American Convention on Human Rights, and the Protocol of San Salvador, states are required to respect, protect, and promote the exercise and fulfillment of all universal and indivisible human rights. In order to fulfill this obligation, states must demand and ensure that other social and economic players within their jurisdictions, including transnational corporations, also respect human rights.
Nevertheless, governments continue to either ignore prior commitments to the international community on human rights or they treat these commitments separately from economic matters. In some extreme cases, they have pushed for collective, social and labor rights to be excluded from constitutional protection. Frequently, free trade negotiations end up modifying domestic social pacts, making the weakest social partners bear the brunt of concessions made to benefit transnational corporations. These strategies have put human and social rights in jeopardy and have led to the deterioration of protections as well as the weakening of domestic and international enforcement mechanisms. In fact, many governments have put much more emphasis on negotiating trade agreements than protecting human rights. For example, the Committee which is charged with overseeing state compliance with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (which has been ratified by 145 nations) is composed of 18 part-time experts and two staff persons. The World Trade Organization, on the other hand, with roughly an equivalent membership, has over 500 employees and much greater resources. These practices ignore the fact that, according to international law, governments have the fundamental obligation to respect and ensure the exercise of human rights by all persons in their jurisdictions and to demand that other actors, including transnational corporations, uphold basic human rights. Human rights must not be an element tacked on to negotiations, but rather the legal and normative framework for international economic relations. Trade relations should be seen as a means and not as an end for development, since the primary obligation of any government is to achieve its citizens' well being.
The current neo-liberal aproach is incompatible with human rights and has exacerbated the marginalisation of broad sectors of the hemisphere's population. In this context, four basic points must be considered:
The recognition of the rights derived from existing obligations and the ratification of other accords is only the first step toward the full implementation of human rights. This will bring into effect the right to development as a universal and inalienable right and as an integral part of fundamental human rights as declared by the General Assembly of the UN in 1986.
The bodies of the Inter-American system for the protection of human rights should carefully monitor the consistency of trade agreements with the respect of human rights.
The executive nature of the decisions made by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights should be reaffirmed. States should comply with the decisions made by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. States should also adopt the national legal and other measures required to ensure implementation of all decisions emanating from the bodies of the inter-American system for the protection of human rights.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights should review periodically the impact of regional economic integration on human rights. States should ask the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for an advisory opinion on the compatibility between any proposed trade or integration agreement and the human rights principles set forth in the regional conventions.
Any conflict-resolution mechanism in a trade or integration agreement should take into account international and regional standards of human rights protection, as well as the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the process of resolving conflicts arising out of alleged violations of human rights prinicples set forth in those agreements.
In its annual report to the General Assembly of the OAS, the Inter-American Commission should include a standing chapter on measures and action to ensure compliance of all trade and integration agreements with Inter-American and universal instruments for the protection of human rights. In preparing this chapter, the Inter-American Commission shall take into account the contributions of civil society.
In order to implement these international commitments, all parties should ratify the principles of cooperation and coordination among international, regional and national human rights protection instruments.
The liberalization of trade and investment through the free trade agreements signed to date, especially the North American Free Trade Agreement, has had severe social and environmental impacts on peoples and workers. The peoples of the Americas aspire to an international economy based on different principles that prioritize the environment.
From an environmental perspective, the problems with classic trade and investment policy are that they: "externalize" (do not account for) environmental and social costs; they foster more intense energy use, especially of fossil fuels; and they lead to over-exploitation of natural resources and damage to biodiversity, all of which erode the underlying basis of the economy and society. Such policies intensify the expropriation of genetic resources, the destruction of natural ecosystems, environmental degradation in agricultural and urban areas, environmental deregulation, and the violation of the individual and collective civil rights of generations present and future. Therefore, we believe that an accord that is respectful of the environment cannot be achieved through the addition of environmental clauses to the dominant logic of trade agreements. In reality, an environmental perspective would bring profound changes in economic strategy as such and therefore also lead to new thinking about the rules that govern the world economy. Experience has demonstrated that true development that incorporates an environmental perspective is incompatible with leaving the economy to markets forces.
Environmental degradation has also had a disproportionate effect on people living in poverty, especially women, as they tend to live with the impact of polluted habitats and resources in places where there is little political will to improve those conditions. Supporters of neoliberal policies tend to view some dimensions of sustainability (such as food security, the protection and use of collective wisdom about and use of biodiversity, the sustainable use of ecosystems and the existence of fair and equitable ways of sharing the benefits of natural resources) as obstacles to international trade. Governments for the most part have rejected these ideals, yielding instead to international market pressures.
Trade and financial liberalization stimulate and favor the entry of large transnational corporations into our countries, companies that are dedicated, in general, to export activities based on the intensive utilization of natural resources and energy. Those activities are often stimulated by the use of public resources. This means that state resources, which should be directed to social investments, end up facilitating even more exports and consumption of natural resources by the wealthiest sectors of society, with prices therefore remaining artificially low in the international market. This is, therefore, a mechanism that stimulates both concentration of wealth and environmental degradation.
Forests
The forests of the Americas are the home of numerous indigenous peoples and other traditional communities that obtain from them the means of their physical subsistence, while at the same time ensuring their cultural survival. In addition, many other peoples and rural inhabitants living in areas near forests acquire from them numerous goods and services that ensure their livelihoods. Forests are also repositories of most of the current land-based biodiversity in the hemisphere, and also fulfill essential environmental functions, as much in the local as global realms. Therefore, the risks of the free trade model on the region's forests and for those who depend on them must be carefully evaluated.
The experience and results of trade agreements in this hemisphere, especially NAFTA, as well as neoliberal policies in general, show that the standards of protection for forests have been weakened. Indiscriminate logging has seriously harmed the peoples who inhabit forests or those who depend on forests. Moreover, employment has been lost in the forest sector, and the exploitation of native forests without improvements to inefficient and destructive forest extraction systems has accelerated. Industrial forest plantations cannot be considered to be forests, since they lack the majority of their characteristic values and in general contribute to processes of deforestation.
Therefore, any international agreement in the Americas should:
Biodiversity and Intellectual Property
Conservation of biodiversity has been the responsibility of thousands of communities that use and cultivate resources for subsistence rather than for profit. There is a direct relationship between cultural, natural and agricultural diversity; they support each other. The international exchange of the resources generated by biodiversity has historically been of benefit to many peoples, although those benefits have been distributed less equitably over the last few decades. Conservation, research and development of genetic resources ex-situ in public and private scientific centers, combined with intellectual property systems, has institutionalized the looting and monopolization of genetic resources.
The hemisphere currently faces enormous threats to its biodiversity due to pressure from international trade liberalization treaties and the actions of multinational corporations, supported by national or regional legislation that covers their activities.
These threats are, among other things, contributing to the plunder and overexploitation of resources, genetic and cultural erosion, the disappearance of species of flora and fauna and traditional agricultural varieties, the disruption of ecosystems, biological contamination with genetically modified organisms, multiple economic, social and cultural impacts on peasant, indigenous and other local populations with traditional lifestyles who have been displaced by force or by the destruction of their livelihoods.
In recent years some processes that result in increasingly negative impacts on natural as well as cultural diversity have intensified. Megaprojects of natural resource exploitation, including the energy and transportation infrastructure that go with them, have a direct negative physical impact. There are also more indirect processes that lead to very negative impacts. These are, notably, the accentuation of the privatization process starting with intellectual property laws, the introduction of genetically modified organisms, the looting and privatization of genetic resources and knowledge through "biopiracy," and the privatization - formal or de facto - of natural protected areas, depriving traditional populations of them and/or expelling them.
Taking these situations into account, the principles and objectives guiding any international agreement or regulation should serve to:
Sustainable energy sources
Sustainable energy development is predicated on respect for the right of communities, energy savings, and the fight against excessive energy consumption. Energy sources should be renewable, clean and low-impact. Access to those sources should be democratic and equitable.
In order to carry out this vision, it is clear that nation-states and local communities must control the development of energy sources and other natural resources. Unfortunately, the draft text of the FTAA includes various proposals similar to those in NAFTA that would make these controls difficult or impossible.
Specifically, the draft FTAA text includes measures that limit the use of export taxes, export quotas or minimum prices. In addition, it opens the door to one of the most dangerous articles in NAFTA, which requires countries to continue to export non-renewable natural resources even during periods of national scarcity. The chapter on competition policy includes provisions that would prohibit the establishment of "non-production" or other restrictions on the supply or demand of goods and services.
Energy integration should be a process that allows for the growth of potential and for cooperation among different countries, under equitable conditions that reflect each nation's economic, social and cultural characteristics.
Therefore, the following are proposed:
Mining
Mining in the Americas has involved many decades of heavy metal pollution and the destruction of land and sea habitats, as well as threats to the health and safety of mine workers and their families, who often live near hazardous work-sites and suffer effects to their physical and reproductive health due to contact with such contamination. These conditions are present throughout the hemisphere and reflect inefficient public policies designed to control the environmental impact of this activity, as well as clearly predatory corporate behavior.
The accelerated expansion of mining carried out by international companies has not been accompanied by stronger controls, regulations or safeguards for human or environmental health. Instead, it has generated greater demand for the use of resources such as water and energy.
Therefore, the governments of the Americas should:
Insecticides
The intensive use of chemical insecticides on monoculture agricultural export production creates serious public health problems, such as: frequent poisoning resulting from the use of extremely and highly toxic insecticides; the generation of chronic health problems such as birth defects, cancer, alterations of hormone systems, reproductive problems and effects on neurological systems. Children, women of reproductive age and indigenous migratory workers are the sectors that are at greatest risk.
Similarly, the intensive use of chemical insecticides threatens the biodiversity of agroecosystems and the region's environment due to the destruction of microflora and microfauna in the soil, the effects on beneficial insects, birds and other species of wildlife; the impacts of aerial spraying, contamination of subterranean water, leaching of contaminants from irrigation channels to rivers, lagoons and seas; in addition to causing resistance in insects, fungi and weeds.
The models of regulation and control of the pollution that results from insecticide use in the region have been ineffective due to the lack of enforcement of laws and standards, deficient monitoring and the lack of recognition of the public access to information on the use of insecticides and their impact on environmental and food quality. Therefore, the governments of the Americas must:
Toxic substances and residues, solid and dangerous waste products
The generation of dangerous waste products creates a serious problem of environmental contamination and public health that threatens the sustainability of the Americas. In spite of that, industry has promoted a paradigm of evaluation and risk management of toxic substances rather than the prevention of exposure to them, and favored technologies to treat dangerous wastes at the end of the production process instead of proposing changes and evaluating alternatives to the intensive use of toxic chemical substances and dangerous materials. Transnational corporations seek to homogenize consumer needs, centralize production at the cost of employment and the environment, and encourage waste production and generation in order to augment profits.
Neoliberal policies of indiscriminate trade liberalization and incentives for foreign investment promote self-regulation of industry and lead to lower levels of control of trade in dangerous substances and materials, the relocation of polluting industries in the region, and the export of dirty technologies for the treatment of dangerous waste products. In the case of NAFTA, protections are also provided for foreign investors through compensatory measures that allow them to claim damages worth millions of dollars if they are affected by conservation or public health protection measures, alleging discriminatory or expropriation practices.
Therefore we demand that the governments of the Americas:
In the official documents related to the FTAA negotiations the expression "sustainable development" is limited to formal declarations by ministers and heads of states following their meetings or summits.
Just as "free trade" dangerously appropriates the concept of "freedom", the concepts of development and sustainability take on very different meanings depending on who is using them.
The promoters of free trade defend their positions based on the general theory that liberalization will result in international specialization of production based on free competition among producers, leading to benefits for all, with reductions in production costs and, consequently, prices to consumers. This would lead, therefore, to a general increase in production and consumption, i.e., economic growth. This consumption, as it generates more wealth, would also lead to new cycles of growth and expansion of trade. The virtuous circle of trade would therefore close with economic growth, reductions in poverty and environmental protection.
The promoters of free trade, in spite of their frequent appropriation of the term "sustainable development", hold out the promise of unlimited growth of production and consumption, as if it were possible that all inhabitants of the planet could have access to the already unsustainable patterns of consumption that occur in developed countries.
Meanwhile, the consequences of growing trade liberalization and international financial flows produce very different effects from those predicted by the neoliberal doctrine. International specialization of production has made the terms of trade less and less favorable for developing countries. Free circulation of capital, whether speculative or not, worsens many countries' balance of payments. The indiscriminate withdrawal of mechanisms to protect industrial production worsens this scenario even further, generating unemployment and needs for additional imports. The case of Mexico under NAFTA demonstrates the unsustainability of this model, as official data acknowledge that the cost of environmental deterioration and degradation is equivalent to 10% of GDP every year under NAFTA. Beyond that, the promised economic growth has not materialized, as average GDP per capita grew just 0.94% a year.
Pressured both by foreign debt and by the international financial institutions' policy conditions, these countries have had to adopt measures that, while dealing with the short-term external account problems, compromise their populations' quality of life over the long term:
The historical tendency toward falling prices for primary export commodities, linked to the increasing need to import industrial goods, as well as growing capital remittances for interest payments, profit remittances, royalties, etc., only increase the gap between rich and poor countries.
Therefore a growing segment of the population in Latin America finds it impossible -- due to insufficient income - to obtain the basic natural resources needed for decent living standards. At the same time, the richer countries, who benefit from profits on investments and the fall in the prices of primary goods, adopt patterns of consumption that are increasingly unsustainable.
As it is based on this logic of unlimited growth in production and consumption by the most favored sectors of the population, the FTAA plan goes against the path of sustainability with social justice that we want. The addition of new countries to an agreement that restricts the freedom to adopt autonomous economic, social, and environmental policies implies the loss of sovereignty to implement sustainable development plans at the national and regional levels.
Our analysis leads us to conclude that, at least in name of the precautionary principle, we should take a firm position against the FTAA in the form it is now being presented. As we see it, that agreement will lead us away from a plan for sustainable and democratic development that deals with the totality of our societies' real needs, something that is not surprising, since none of the member countries have any plan that would point in this direction.
The achievement of sustainable regional integration that promotes the welfare of the majority of the population would require regulatory mechanisms. Regulations that put the integration processes, and within them trade agreements, at the service of social interests and sustainabililty should be constructed with broad participation by civil society. Organized social actors, not markets, should be the protagonists in the definition of the course of integration and the development of countries. Moreover, integration based on equity both among countries and within them would require democratic institutions capable of ensuring transparency and civil-society participation.
This institutional structure should contribute to the development of mechanisms for cooperation among countries that should replace the practice of sanctions that characterizes trade negotiations. Social control, regulation, democratic institutions, and cooperation, therefore, should be the pillars for the constitution of a process of democratic and sustainable integration.
The globalization that characterizes the contemporary world is provoking significant changes occurring at an accelerated rate. Economic integration schemes in the American continent, arising from the regional and bilateral free trade agreements and the policies of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs), have brought with them processes of social exclusion and polarization. However, their effects have not been homogenous and acquire distinct depths, forms and meanings according to the contexts in which they are inserted. The American continent is a mosaic of cultures and races, indigenous peoples and African descendents, and economic, social and ecological realities, in which globalization takes on specific traits. This diversity is also expressed in gender relations, which are a fundamental component of the economic and social organization of the region's nations and peoples.
The changes which have occurred in the lives of women and men over the past twenty years are not the simple result of the free market economy. The decade of the 1990s and these first years of the new century have also been marked by social mobilization to defend the exercise of integral human rights: economic, social, labor, cultural and environmental, as well as political and civil rights, as the standard and framework which should guide development strategies. The social mobilization of female workers and campesinas, and indigenous and urban-popular women, together with the feminist movement, have achieved the placement of a broad range of proposals for the advancement of gender equity in the national and international political agendas.
The proposals to achieve social and gender equity are often built against the tide of growing inequalities characterizing the globalized world. The concentration of wealth and power, exacerbation of both public and private violence, imposition of cultural models promoting consumerism and aimed at standardizing lifestyles, increasing poverty, deterioration of natural resources and sustainable forms of production, and prevalence of discrimination (for motives of gender, race, age, sexual orientation, or indigenous or African- American ethnicity), coexist with the conviction of broad population sectors that "another America is possible." This obligates us to identify the effects of the neoliberal model which are common for all women and men, while also analyzing the specific forms acquired by gender inequities and building alternatives to eradicate them.
The negative balances that characterized the so-called "lost decade" work in detriment to the possibilities of greater empowerment and autonomy for women incorporating within the worst segments of the labor market. Their incorporation not only has not relieved their housework burden, but that work has actually increased due to the shrinking of the State.
The structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and early 1990s paved the way for negotiation, signature and instrumentation of the free trade agreements and the intensification of foreign investments associated with those agreements. The adjustment programs were oriented to promote structural transformations in economies, including redefinition of the State role, modification of legal frameworks in particular in reference to the regulation and control of strategic resources, and reorientation of production in developing countries toward the export sector. More concretely, the adjustment programs meant drastic reductions in price subsidies, especially of agricultural products and basic services, and a strong drop in public investments in infrastructure, education and health.
A greater proportion of the social costs of reproduction and maintenance of the workforce were transferred to the "private" sphere, with the consequence that the economic and social value of this contribution has become even more invisible. Women, who traditionally - and still - are responsible for a large part of social reproduction,1 saw their labor burdens increase to replace a State which reduced and limited its functions. Women absorbed the impact of structural adjustment by working longer and harder both in and outside the home.
Latin America and the Caribbean grew from 620 billion dollars in 1995 to 752 billion in 2003. By that year, Brazil's debt reached 235 billion dollars, followed by Mexico with 149 billion and Argentina with 145 billion (CEPAL, 2004).
The beginning of the 1990s was accompanied by the initiation of negotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the first such agreement of the continent, which has been followed by several others within the same scheme. The promises of economic growth which would External debt in translate into better levels of social well-being, not only have not been fulfilled, but the negative effects of these agreements have been added to old problems such as the enormous external debt burden -in some countries transformed into or accompanied by heavy internal debt- with the exacerbation of the economic dependence of the majority of, if not all, Latin American and Caribbean countries. The populations of the United States and Canada have not enjoyed improvements from the free trade agreements either. More than 37 million people in the world's wealthiest country are officially classified as poor and this figure increases year after year. The well-paid jobs for low-qualified operators in heavy industry, which once elevated the level of the United States middle class, have virtually disappeared and continue to do so. Since 2001, the United States has lost more than 2.7 million jobs in the manufacturing sector (Reuter Noticias, 2005).
Female labor participation went from 39% in 1990 to 44.7% in 1998 with an annual increase of almost 5%, while that of men during the same period remained stable at levels around 75% (ILO, 2005). In Canada and the United States, female economic participation rates are higher, at 57. 5% and 59.2% respectively in 2004 (ILO, 2004).
Urban informal employment in Latin America and the Caribbean increased from 42.8% to 46.7% in 2003. By that year, female informal employment was 50.1%, while that of men reached 44.1%.
One of the most important changes in women's participation in the economy is produced in this economic context: their massive and accelerated integration into the labor market, both formal and informal, and in both the urban and rural spheres.
This intensification of women's integration to the labor market is combined with the increase of women's access to distinct levels of education and other advancements achieved in this period. Nevertheless, the advantages of obtaining their own incomes are limited or in fact reverted by the quality of the jobs generated, characterized by their precarious and informal status. The labor flexibility implanted by the new production schemes make women's integration into the workforce possible, but in frankly exploitative conditions. Low wages, poorly-paid piecework or work out of the home, extra long workdays, and job instability and rotation, are some of the characteristics of a female labor force which is flexible and inclined to accept conditions which allow it to combine housework with that carried out outside the home. These conditions are repeated in micro-industries and are accentuated in the exportoriented'maquiladora assembly-line manufacturing industry, which for many years was the primary source of formal employment for women in various countries, especially in Central America and Mexico.
Women's incomes are 75% lower than those of men. This percentage improves in the case of more highly educated women (Grynspan, 2003).
Furthermore, women continue to obtain wages inferior to those paid to men, and they are employed in traditionally female branches and sectors (Birgin, 2001). At the same time, education, health, and social security services are in abject deterioration, or access to them has been significantly restricted, as in the reforms to the pension and retirement systems. This decline in social services is added to the attempts to privatize health, education, water, and other services to leave them subject to the free play of the market like any other "merchandise."
More than 200 million people were poor in 1990 (48.3%), and according to CEPAL estimates this number reached 225 million in 2003 (43.9%) (CEPAL, 2003).
Concentration of wealth and expansion of poverty have been the signs accompanying world-scale encroachment of the neoliberal model. Inequalities have been accentuated in our continent, considered the region with the greatest social disparities in the world. Poverty reaches its greatest proportions in rural areas, especially those inhabited by indigenous and Afro-mestizo populations. The urban poverty, including that present in the developed countries of North America, is also worrisome. There are more poor women than men, including a greater proportion of impoverished households headed by women.
Levels of exchange and trade dependency of Latin American and Caribbean countries in relation with the United States. Percentage of total exports whose destination is the United States: Mexico, Haiti and Honduras: More than 50% Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia and the majority of the members of the Central American Common Market and the Caribbean Community: Between 25 and 50% The countries of MERCOSUR, Chile, Panama and Peru: Less than 25%. Fuente: Red Internacional de Género y Comercio. 2003.
Three out of ten persons in Latin America and the Caribbean live in rural areas and depend on agriculture, fishing, livestock, forestry, tourism, and other activities for their subsistence. The rules established for the free trade agreements, such as NAFTA and other bilateral agreements, have wrought havoc in the lives of women and men in the countryside, who have faced an accelerated increase in imported agricultural products and the opening of borders to the large agro-industrial and agro-trade companies. In the rural regions, it is common to find a dynamic agro-industrial sector linked to export crops, controlled by large national and transnational capitals, and a severely straggling traditional sector, resulting in lost food security. The intensification of female participation in field work and other rural tasks obeys a family poverty-relief strategy and the decrease of agricultural and fishing incomes. Some calculations indicate that the women of the continent contribute close to 40% of food production and their contribution to poverty alleviation is significant. Micro-enterprises and self-employment contribute continuously more income sources, especially for poor women. However, the small projects have low possibilities for success because local, national and international markets are dominated by the giants who control the agro-food sectors, against which it is impossible to compete.
Women's right to land ownership, loan access, water source concessions, biodiversity, and access to other natural resources, lag far behind the rhythm of women's contribution to the rural economy. Programs promoting joint property titles to family land, so that ownership be officially shared by women and men, face legal, political and cultural obstacles that redound in a lack of economic and social recognition of women's productive role. That role, and women's traditional backyard activities and household work, are not taken into consideration in allocation of land ownership titles or usufructuary rights to water, forests and other resources. On the other hand, the rules imposed by the free trade agreements on intellectual property rights open the doors for transnational companies to patent and appropriate the genetic resources and traditional knowledge of the indigenous communities.
Some 25 million Latin American and Caribbean adults live outside their countries of origin. Two out of three of these regularly send money to their families (IDB, 2005).
Migration is an escape valve amidst the decline of the agricultural sector that combines with the sustained demand for cheap and flexible labor in the United States. The flow of Latin American and Caribbean male and female workers to that country grows and maintains itself, despite reinforced security and bordercontrol measures implemented in recent years. The money sent by Latin American and Caribbean migrants to their communities of origin reached 45.8 billion dollars in 2004 (IDB, 2005) and constitutes an important proportion of the national foreign exchanges and economies in El Salvador, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and other countries. The proportion of men who immigrate -especially without legal documents- continues to be higher than that of women, but many young women and even entire families move internally to work in the maquila industry, as export-crop agricultural field hands, or as domestic workers. The figures indicate that gender discrimination factors are reproduced in jobs occupied by Latin American and Caribbean female migrants in the United States (Gammage, 2004) who occupy the lowest-paid jobs, together with children. Employment conditions are also disadvantaged for women in agro-industrial companies in their countries of origin. The difficulties encountered for the return of male migrants often result in abandonment of their homes of origin, contributing to increase the number of rural homes headed by women who are forced to assume the responsibility to sustain their families in very precarious conditions.
The growing military presence, as an act of domination over our peoples, has contributed to the sexual abuse of women, girls and boys, and to increased incidence of prostitution and violence. Along the borders, trafficking of persons has intensified, with specific dangerous consequences for women. In our America, feminicides increased following the establishment of neoliberal policies and with the tolerance of our governments. The State of Law in our countries is limited to the discourse, because the reality is characterized by impunity and lack of security in our homes, on the streets, and in women's lives in general.
It is clear that the current continental economic integration scheme is disadvantaged for women and does not contribute to reduce social and gender inequities. Alternatives must urgently be promoted which effectively lead toward profound cultural changes to eliminate the discrimination of women and contribute to the construction of a more dignified and equitable society.
To advance toward economic integration schemes which are inclusive, democratic, and respectful of the social and cultural diversity of the countries of the Americas, guiding principles must be adopted to constitute a frame of reference for analysis, proposals, and action toward a new globalization. Some of the guiding principles oriented to diminish and eliminate the gender asymmetries are:
The guiding principles toward a new model of relations among the countries of the continent must be accompanied by objectives which foster the generation of social mobilization capable of opening opportunities and spaces for society's participation -including women and men- in the design of the international trade agreements and treaties as well as the national public policies which sustain them. The objectives enunciated below outline the action program of the Women's Committee of the Continental Social Alliance:2