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The FTAA: How Does It Measure up to Church Policy?
Contents
KAIROS’s call to stop FTAA negotiations springs from the
Canadian churches’ long-standing belief that international
trade agreements must be based on the principles of human rights,
environmental sustainability, and economic justice. In April 2001,
during the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, the Inter-Church
Coalitions produced a Ten-Point Justice Agenda for the Americas
calling for international trade agreement to:
- ensure that human rights take precedence over commercial interests,
- give priority to eradicating poverty,
- generate high quality jobs and economic stability,
- protect the environment and human health,
- ensure food security,
- uphold the right of all citizens to access essential social
services,
- give special and differential treatment to small and less developed
countries,
- release countries from intolerable and unjust debt burdens,
- give governments the right to control their development and
- give citizens broad-based access to the process via citizen
participation and transparency around negotiations.
At this time twelve Canadian church leaders wrote to the Prime Minister
and other heads of state and government, urging them “to
create not simply a trade agreement, but a framework for a more neighbourly
economy” that would achieve six goals:
- Conform any new agreements to the human rights standards in
UN covenants.
- Protect and promote the inherent rights of Aboriginal peoples
in the Americas.
- Cancel paralyzing national debts.
- Enhance food security and the security of agricultural communities.
- Preserve the integrity of publicly funded health and education
services.
- Not allow patents, or trade-related intellectual property rights,
to block access to public goods like life-saving medicines.
The church leaders’ letter also called for “genuine
transparency and for public participation to be restored to your
negotiations.”
Unfortunately, the current FTAA draft fails on each and every one
of these counts (except insofar as there has been increased transparency
with the release of the draft FTAA text). This is why KAIROS is
now calling for a suspension of negotiations.
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What Individual Churches Are Saying
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Inter-church efforts have been bolstered and supported by long-standing
policies on international trade held by many individual Canadian
churches. For example:
- In 1987 the 113th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church
in Canada (PCC) urged the Government of Canada “to state
unequivocally that social programs such as universal health care,
social security, unemployment insurance and welfare are not negotiable
in any trade talks with the United States Government.”
- In its report to the General Assembly the PCC International
Affairs Committee linked the defence of social programs to the
prophetic mission of the church: “Canada has a responsibility
to maintain and improve our own social programmes and an opportunity
to be prophetic in the biblical sense by calling the nations,
and particularly our southern neighbour, to do justice and not
to ‘sell the needy for a pair of shoes’ (Amos 2:6)”
- During the debate on the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, Archbishop
Michael Peers, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, enunciated
the following four principles for evaluating a trade agreement:
- Economic plans must not affect the most vulnerable members
of our Canadian society, nor of our global family, in a negative
way.
- Economic or social agreements should not be undertaken if
they limit society’s members from making future decisions
on behalf of the common good.
- Economic agreements should not be undertaken which reduce
our ability as a society to be good stewards of our environment.
- Ordinary citizens must be allowed opportunity to understand
what is at stake and to take part in a meaningful way in decisions
of major importance.”
- The United Church of Canada passed resolutions at
its 30th, 31st, 32nd and 37th General Councils (1984, 1986, 1988
and 2000) all rooted in concern for the poor, the marginalized
and the natural environment. A particular concern of the United
Church has been to protect “public programs, such as medicare
[and] hospital insurance” (31st) and “Canada’s
democratic ability to use capital and resources for worthy national
purposes and our ability to use our democratic and economic institutions
to more adequately care for each other as Canadians.” (32nd)
In 2000, the 37th General Council reflected that “international
trade agreements often ignore the rights and welfare of poor people,
the need for nations to be able to act in their people’s
best interest, and the need for ecological sustainability.”
- Canada’s Roman Catholic Bishops have spoken out
frequently on trade agreements. They have asserted “The
primary purpose of an economy should be the common good, namely,
to equitably serve the basic needs of all people in a given society.
‘All other rights whatsoever, including those of property
and free commerce, must be subordinated to this principle’”
[citing the words of Pope Paul VI in On the Development of
Peoples #22] In the same encyclical (#58) Paul VI went on
to say that “The rule of free trade, taken by itself,
is no longer able to govern international relations. Its advantages
are certainly evident when the parties involved are not affected
by any excessive inequalities of economic power. … But the
situation is no longer the same when economic conditions differ
too widely from country to country: prices which are ‘freely’
set in the market can produce unfair results.”
- This plea for transparency echoes a resolution passed by the
Third Biennial Convention of the Evangelical Lutheran Church
in Canada in 1991 calling for “full disclosure of
all the elements of the proposed [NAFTA] and [for] a means for
full public participation to hear the views of Canadians prior
to the signing of any agreement.”
In November of 2002 a group of theologians from throughout the
Americas met in Havana to reflect on the prospects for an FTAA.
Their final document, A No to the FTAA is a Yes to Life says
the experience of Canada, Mexico and the U.S. under NAFTA shows
an inability “to solve the socio-economic problems of
the majority” and demonstrates “perverse impacts on
sovereignty, employment, ecosystems and culture, as well as revealing
itself as an antidemocratic exercise.” The Declaration
characterizes the FTAA as “a system of domination presented
as an absolute outside of which there is no life” and
affirms that “yes, there is life … the life in abundance
that Jesus came to bring us.” (John 10:10)
KAIROS calls on the Canadian government to listen to these voices
of churches across Canada and around the world. We ask that governments
respect God’s call to protect the earth and ensure justice
for its peoples. This means stopping negotiations on the Free Trade
Area of the Americas.
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