Citizens Trade Campaign

Contact Congress on the 2009 TRADE Act

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Send the letter below to your U.S. Senators and Representatives.

September 02, 2010

Subject:

The administration has given notice that it intends to bring the Peru Free Trade Agreement before Congress this year. It has indicated that it wants to roll Colombia and Ecuador into the package. This trade deal repeats every mistake of NAFTA and CAFTA, and in several respects is worse.

Like NAFTA and CAFTA, the deal provides no requirement that core labor standards be enforced. This is despite the fact that Peru’s President Toledo offered to include such standards in the deal. This lack is more alarming should the administration succeed in rolling in Colombia. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions has documented that in 2004 (the last year in for which there are statistics), 445 Colombian trade union members received death threats and 99 were actually murdered, an increase of ten percent over the previous year. Colombia accounts for more than two-thirds of all murders of trade unionists in the world, and some 90 percent of all reported death threats. These assassinations and death threats are carried out with near complete impunity.

This continued insistence by the administration that serious labor rights enforcement must be kept out of trade deals ensures that workers in our trading partner nations will be forced to work under sweatshop conditions, and thus will lead to continued loss of U.S. jobs.

The agreement’s agricultural provisions would cause such harm to farmers in the region that many of them can be expected to turn to coca cultivation or work in the narcotics industry. This threatens both the stability of nations in the region and our drug enforcement problem.

Additionally, Peru FTA/AFTA’s Investment, Procurement, and Services provisions all contain rules that would require the privatization of public services and that would curtail environmental protection in the region, and possibly in the United States.

Finally, the deal’s intellectual property provisions are yet another step worse than those of CAFTA in favoring the interests of the pharmaceutical industry over those of affordable medicine for people impacted by public health emergencies, such as HIV/AIDS. The Peru FTA’s “data exclusivity” provision is more severe than CAFTA’s and further decreases the chances that victims of HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria and other regionally significant diseases will have access to any new medicines developed for their disease.

The Peru FTA/AFTA is another step in the wrong direction for the global economy. I urge you to oppose it and to do so publicly now.

Sincerely.

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