Declaration from the Women’s Committee of the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA) at the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) Ministerial Meeting in Miami

The members of the Women’s Committee of the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA) present in Miami during the FTAA Ministerial Meeting, declare our inconformity with the direction of the negotiation process that is stated in the Declaration that was signed by the Ministers.

Since the Fourth World Conference of Women that took place in Beijing in 1995, women developed an important agenda about the issues that governments should first address in order to advance a more just and equal society, not only for women but also for our communities. This agenda includes economic, social, cultural, and political issues, and emphasizes the following: gender equity, the right to a life without violence, the struggle against wage and occupational discrimination of women, the right to free association of workers in defense of labor rights, the access to food, education, health, essential services, and to a quality of life and wellbeing that is free from discrimination based on sex, age, and ethnicity.

The achievement of this agenda has been impeded and reversed by the political proposals and impositions of trade agreements, the neoliberal economic model, and patriarchal dominance. This model imposes and reproduces unequal relations between and within nations, and between women and men.

The experiences, research, and analysis of the real impacts of trade agreements such as NAFTA in our countries has demonstrated that these agreements, rather than resolving the acute problems that plague our countries, make them worse.

The FTAA extends authoritarianism and militarization because it constructs a kind of domination and imposition that is deepened within the context of the globalized war (?) and patriarchal domination in our countries. It does not support the construction of a real democracy in which gender equity could be possible and it violates the constitutions, pacts, treaties, and human rights conventions, in which gender is included. The global economic system is not sustainable within this structure of exclusion.

Women Say NO TO the FTAA because:

1. Initiatives such as the FTAA leave our countries legally defenseless since they seek to institute themselves as Supreme Law by acquiring constitutional authority and placing themselves above the national, state, and municipal laws of a country. Countries such as Mexico have experienced how these practices, in the investment chapters for example, have been used by large transnational corporations to undermine the sovereign rights of countries to decide when to accept or reject foreign investment that protects the environment.

2. The agriculture chapters in the trade agreements-and in the draft FTAA agreement- award commercial advantages to the export of agriculture products and procurement from the United States, those that flood national markets with highly subsidized products from transnational corporations. These rules subject small farm economies to unfair competition that lead to the bankruptcy of local agricultural production. The FTAA not only commits an outrage against the productive sector but also destroys the way of life of hundreds of thousands of families. Women in the countryside play a fundamental role in the reproduction of the rural, indigenous and popular family; this has remained irrelevant in the logic of trade agreements. Women continue to be subjected to the heaviest workload, to the need to seek employment in the informal sector, and to being separated from their families and their communities.

3. Migration has become the only alternative for thousands of people-men and women-from the countryside and the city due to the lack of labor opportunities, many of which they lost due to trade agreements. The number of young women migrants has increased with the growing need for the survival of their families. The patrons of migration (?) impose the actual conditions of migration that cannot be more disadvantageous for women. When the women migrate, they have to abandon their families, their children-who generally are left in the care of other young girls or elderly family members; if they migrate with their entire families, their lives are subject to significant inequality in terms of education, health, food, wellbeing. When it is the men who leave in search of jobs in other places within and outside their countries of origen, the women are left alone-without resources- to care for their families. The example of Mexico could not be more dismal: while they have been touted as the model of the benefits of free trade, millions of Mexicans live and work in the U.S. under precarious legal and social conditions, undocumented migrants are brutally persecuted, and the Bush administration has no interest in negotiating a Migrant Agreement and it continues to maintain the illegal status of workers in order to force them to accept low salaries. The impacts of NAFTA and the national political accords that have emerged from this agreement have caused the foreign remittances that Mexicans living abroad send home to be the primary source of foreign exchange for the country-surpassing even the petroleum industry and the manufacturing and tourism sectors. This is the result of the promises of development that NAFTA offered to Mexico and today the FTAA is offering this same reality to the rest of Latin America: unemployment and expulsion and persecution of hundreds of thousands of women and men.

4. Intellectual Property Rights established in the agreements have permitted powerful chemical laboratories and transnational pharmaceutical companies to appropriate the riches from flora and fauna that many countries in the Americas possess. The villages and indigenous women who live in them and have conserved large areas with the oldest biodiversity, are targets of large mining, forestry, pharmaceutical, water, and energy companies, among others. All of these resources are being converted into goods through processes of privatization and industrialization controlled by large foreign investors.

5. Public services such as water, education, and health are no longer viewed as the means to social wellbeing and instruments for the development of communities but rather will be converted into tradable goods offered to the highest bidder if the FTAA and other similar trade agreements are implemented. The costs of social reproduction will be transferred to families and, within this, to the women. Trade agreements don’t only fail to promote equal sharing of responsibility of social reproduction between the genders and within society, but also worsen the conditions of women and their ability to provide health, education, water, and services to their families and communities.

6. The maquila model that promotes the neoliberal system of economic development for the poor countries has been shown to be highly exploitative of the women workers who suffer from low salaries, long distances to travel to work, unclean working conditions, sexual harassment, and labor and human rights violations. The maquila export industry has enjoyed large financial privileges without its growth leading to significant development successes in the regions in which it is located. It has economically weakened other sectors of the national economy and imposed precarious environmental and labor conditions under the constant threat of transferring to other regions. It is not a model of industrialization towards which countries in the region that are working towards national development should aspire, and it is also not an acceptable alternative for women who are interested in joining the labor force. Rather, it is quite the opposite.

7. Trade agreements and the FTAA act with the logic of transforming all human activity into tradable goods from which to reap profits that benefit the transnational corporations and those who accumulate the riches. Because of this, we are witnessing new forms of suppression and exploitation of women, simply because of the fact that they are women, so much so that their bodies are now considered to be disposable.

8. Trade agreements and the FTAA undermine the authority of the State in the society, limit its role and attributes and, in the process, consolidate the presence and concentrate the national decision-making powers of the transnational consortiums that come from the biggest world powers. In the case of our continent, it is the United States.

9. The women of the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA) don’t oppose the processes of economic integration that respect human rights and are inclusive instead of asymmetrical. However, we do oppose the FTAA and similar bilateral trade agreements that violate human rights and permit the growth of new forms of oppression and domination of women and communities.

The Women Members of the Hemispheric Social Alliance:

Affirm that the FTAA is based on something other than ‘free trade’ that is neither free, nor trade but is rather an instrument used to benefit the few and the most powerful.

We denounce the abusive use of power by transnational corporations and their governments that increase social exclusion and worsen the differential relations between countries, social sectors, and men and women. Women are impacted differently than men by trade agreements, finding themselves in disadvantageous positions in the workplace, within the family and the community.

We therefore demand:

1. The promotion of dialogue and negotiations that create new forms of relationships between countries based on conditions of equity that allow equal participation of women and men.

2. The prioritization and privileging of food security and sovereignty through the promotion of sustainable forms of production that not only value, protect, and acknowledge the role of women in production and reproduction but also empower them. Women should have the right to the use and ownership of land, access to water, the sensible use of the forests and other natural resources that are equal to the opportunities of men. The new forms of economic integration should support and promote alternative rural economies and fair trade networks.

3. The respect of human (economic, social, political, and cultural) rights of migrants that guarantee freedom of movement of people [such as the laws that enable the free movement of capital and goods?].

4. The patrons of migration (?) should take into consideration the different needs of women and men and the impact of migration on children. The contribution that migrants make to the economies to which they travel is made at the price of their personal, family, and community development. Therefore, we insist on the elimination of all forms of violence against and exploitation of women and children.

5. The State should guarantee public services such as health, food, education, and water, and maintain control of strategic resources such as petroleum and electrical energy. Women should be integrated into the decision-making mechanisms that determine use and distribution of these essential resources, especially water.

We want the governments to know that we are following the negotiations and their impacts on our lives and we are aware of the pressure that the United States is secretly exerting on them that is unacceptable because it infringes on the autonomy of countries. (not sure about this part)

We call on our governments to create alliances and develop a united position that benefits the communities of the region.

We the women from the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA) demand that the official negotiators change the rules of the game by rejecting the abuse of power and the pressure of the U.S. and we call on them to reconstruct an equal and dignified form of integration.

We the women of the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA) promise to promote an alternative model of integration for the Americas.

We present our Political Declaration and the Political Strategies approved in the International Forum for the Rights of Women in Trade Agreements that took place in Quintana Roo, Cancun from September 8-9, 2003.

ANOTHER EQUAL AND UNITED AMERICAS IS POSSIBLE!

Women’s Committee of the HSA