Statement by IFG Board Member, Lori Wallach, Director, Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch

For Immediate Release:

November 20, 2003

Contact: Chris Slevin (202) 277-8083

The Beginning of the End of FTAA: Crisis Leads to Scale Back in Scope, Punting Hard Decisions Off with No Instructions to Overcome Differences

Summit Ends Early: All that Can Be Agreed is Not to Make Miami the FTAA's Waterloo!

Statement of Lori M. Wallach, Director, Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch

The FTAA is in such a state of crisis that at the Miami Ministerial the U.S. was forced to choose between no FTAA and FTAA-lite. All that was agreed was to scale back the FTAA's scope and punt all of the hard decisions to an undefined future venue so as to not make Miami the Waterloo of FTAA.

Powerful social movements against FTAA in Latin America has made it impossible for those governments to agree to a full NAFTA expansion. Thus, the U.S. chose this week to make the uber concession - to move away from its "single undertaking" vision of FTAA into an a la carte approach, so as to ensure that FTAA lives to stagger on another day. It is hard to overstate what a huge shift this is in the U.S. position.

Because the Miami Ministerial simply delayed all of the same intractable problems the FTAA faced coming into Miami, whether there will even be an FTAA-lite is far from certain. The draft Ministerial text pushed all of the difficult decisions without further instructions back to the Trade Negotiating Committee - where these issues have been stuck for a year already. Perhaps the idea was to push these issues into future meetings with less press attention, less public profile, less symbolic importance.

Perhaps the clearest sign of the Miami FTAA punt strategy is the draft ministerial declarations treatment of the deadline. It reiterates the January 2005 goal, yet provides no meta-deadlines or instructions about how to meet it. Indeed, the one firm deadline ñ September 30 for the market access talks - tells the real story. It makes clear that everyone knows they can't meet January 2005. If they could, that deadline would have to be much earlier and other deadlines would have to have been set. But, why provide another signal that FTAA is in crisis by stating such in the text, when that news can wait until January 2005 dawns and the talks continue on or not.

The "not" option is still out there. First, the number of treacherous decisions and problems punted to the TNC means nothing is really agreed except not to implode FTAA at Miami. How they resolve these killer issues is far from clear. Second, thee social movements in many FTAA target countries are only growing in strength with the very real possibility that elections occurring before the FTAA deadline in several countries could add to the already-growing bloc of countries who either have to represent their public's interest at the FTAA table or face electoral or governing crises. And for the social movements - including the anti-FTAA movement in the U.S. - half of a NAFTA expansion is as unacceptable as a full NAFTA expansion. The NAFTA model has proved to be a failure over its ten years in operation. Our goal is to replace it altogether, not allow for its expansion either through a watered down FTAA or via bilaterals.