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Highlighting a Trade Agreement Attack on Environmental and Public Health Safeguards |
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Kate Horner, policy analyst at Friends of the Earth, speaks about the environmental impacts of mining operations in El Salvador at a press briefing. Thanks to broad rights granted to corporate investors under the Central American Free Trade Agreement, the U.S. subsidiary of a multinational mining firm is suing the Salvadoran government for millions of dollars over policies designed to protect citizens' health and the environment. |
Trade and investment agreements, from global pacts like the World Trade Organization to regional pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Central American Free Trade Agreement, have set rules for the global economy that put the rights and profits of multinational corporations before the rights of communities and the protection of the environment.
What’s the solution? Transform the way trade and investment agreements are written so that they prioritize people’s rights to work and live in a healthy and safe environment.
Friends of the Earth works to challenge trade and investment rules that threaten environmental protection and to advance fair and environmentally sound policies that instead promote sustainable development, worker and human rights, public health and corporate accountability.
The current direction of international trade policy is unsettled due largely to the success of nongovernmental organizations in exposing the failures of current policies and slowing their expansion. Negotiations at the World Trade Organization are stalled. In Congress, bilateral agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea have also met stiff opposition, and there is a strong progressive coalition committed to making trade work for people and the environment.
Friends of the Earth is pushing Congress to pass the Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment (TRADE) Act, a comprehensive trade reform bill that would set new rules to ensure that existing and future trade pacts advance the public interest.
We are also working to hold President Obama accountable to his pledge to advance fair trade policies as his administration moves forward with agreements initiated by the George W. Bush administration and negotiates a new trade pact with Pacific countries called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
As another round of negotiations on a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement between the United States and seven other Pacific countries began on October 19 in Peru, Friends of the Earth joined 20 other environmental and civil society groups to call for an end to secrecy in these important trade talks.
In October 2011, Congress passed three new free trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. Friends of the Earth and other environmental advocates denounced the ratification of the three agreements, which were negotiated by the George W. Bush administration and are based on the flawed model of the North American Free Trade Agreement.