GREEN PAPER 3: Freedoms
That Are Abolished
download this document (488k). ACERCA
by Brian Tokar
Institute for Social Ecology,
ACERCA Advisory Board
The interests that are seeking to impose the FTAA include many of the same corporations that have tried to overwhelm the food supplies of the US, Canada and Latin American countries alike with unsafe, largely untested products of biotechnology. Argentina and Uruguay have joined the US and Canada as significant exporters of genetically engineered food products, even though the US still produces the lions share of such crops worldwide.
Studies of the effects of genetic engineering in agriculture have demonstrated a wide range of problems for the environment, the safety of food, and the integrity of local farm economies. These consequences could be significantly heightened under an FTAA agreement for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Latin America is a center of biological diversity for many of our common food crops, including corn, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, beans and squash. Engineered crop varieties would be likely to cross-pollinate with related wild plants, spreading exotic combinations of genetic traits at the expense of local ecosystems, and threatening hundreds of indigenous crop varieties. If the FTAA renders countries such as Mexico and Brazil unable to regulate imports of engineered foods and seeds, the consequences for already-marginalized rural communities would be severe.
Since 1999, people in Brazil have been fighting to prevent the cultivation of genetically engineered soybeans (resistant to the herbicide, Roundup) in their country. Today, the country's largely GE-free soybean crop is sold at a premium to companies in Europe and Japan that cannot obtain such assurances from US suppliers. A federal court ruling in July of 2000 supported consumer groups efforts to keep these products out of Brazilian agriculture. Would such initiatives survive under the FTAA? Similarly, Canada has banned the use of Monsanto's genetically engineered cow hormone rBGH (recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone), and sustained this ban under tremendous pressure from US government and corporate interests. Will the FTAA further restrict such efforts to protect public health and sustain local agricultures? Companies such as Grupo Pulsar and PLANFOSUR (a venture of the Texas-based Temple-Inland Forest Products) have described plans to grow plantations of fast-growing genetically engineered eucalyptus trees in Mexico and other countries. Will the FTAA impair peoples ability to protect themselves and their lands from these latest biotechnological threats?
The FTAA, like NAFTA and the WTO, is a project committed to promoting trade at the expense of all other social, economic and environmental needs. Food safety standards under the WTO are subordinated to international sanitary and phytosanitary standards, controlled by the corporate-dominated and publicly unaccountable Codex Alimentarius Commission. The WTO has imposed what is termed the harmonization of laws designed to protect the public i.e., no country or local area could seek greater protections than those imposed internationally, most often by the United States. This applies not only to food, but also to trade in biological resources (bioprospecting, also known as biopiracy) and the patenting of living organisms.
Traditional Mayan healers have protested plans by the University of Georgia and a Welsh biotechnology company to collect medicinal plants for research and potential patents. A Mexican biotechnology institute (based at the National Autonomous University, UNAM) has contracted with a San Diego biotech company called Diversa to provide biological samples for a mere $50 each. In 1991, Costa Rica signed an exclusive agreement with the Merck Chemical Company, granting the company sole access to the country's biological resources in exchange for a million dollars and a five percent royalty on commercial uses. The US National Institute of Health obtained a patent on genetic sequences from the antibodies of an indigenous Guaymi woman from Panama, a patent that was ultimately renounced in the face of overwhelming international pressure. The FTAA is likely to make it far more difficult to expose and challenge future projects such as these.