Organizations Urge Rejection of NAFTA/WTO Model and Insist on Specifics Plans for US Trade Policy During the Next Presidency
After nearly a full year of campaigning in this crucial caucus state, most of the candidates are still asking us to just trust them on trade. But over two-dozen family farm, labor, faith and environmental organizations won't let them off that easy. They’ve put forward the Iowa Fair Trade Statement calling for candidates' concrete commitments and detailed plans for a new trade policy that truly puts working people first.
The groups, signatories to the statement authored by the Iowa Fair Trade Campaign, urge the candidates to reject and abandon the NAFTA/WTO model of trade deals that allows corporations to challenge public interest laws and policies. These rules permit challenges to food safety and environmental laws, limit our ability to inspect imports, encourage the offshoring of millions of good American jobs and devastate family farms.
In speeches across Iowa, the candidates go out of their way to mention about how bad they feel NAFTA's been, but spend more time trying to outdo each other commiserating about the damage than they spend proposing real policy alternatives or charting a new course for a fair global economy. They say they'll "put working people, not corporate interests first" when making new trade deals, or that new "labor and environmental standards" will make trade fair. But this is just what Bill Clinton said about NAFTA.
One look at where NAFTA got us should be enough to show that concrete commitments on a fair trade policy are needed. An Iowa labor leader expresses her frustration in the press release that accompanied the Iowa Fair Trade Statement:
"Caucus goers deserve to know where the candidates stand on this issue today," says Jenny Mitchell, President of the Southwest Iowa Labor Council. "Its time we got past all rhetoric and the finger pointing and hear what the candidates will do today to make sure Iowans and all Americans benefit from future trade deals."
The Iowa Fair Trade Statement proposes six comprehensive points of policy that would ensure that future trade deals protect workers, farmers and consumers. Chief among these proposals is preventing corporations from using trade rules to challenge our laws or policies that provide for the common good.
Trade is a hot-button issue here in Iowa, largely due to massive job loss and damage to family farms. The Iowa Fair Trade Campaign’s release addresses these issues, but also highlights how expansive corporate rights provisions unfair could undermine other parts of the candidates’ agenda:
"Sure it’s about jobs, but it also about democracy and the public good", said Mark Smith, President of the Iowa AFL-CIO, one of the signatories. "Unfair trade laws stop us from enacting policies like ‘Buy America’, or other practices that could address the jobs issue and restrict our options for making policy in the interest of working people."
The release goes on to highlight how family farmers are concerned with more than just how trade deals give unearned advantage to agribusiness, but also how they block progress towards creating sustainable and healthy agriculture:
"NAFTA and the WTO have benefited factory farms and agribusiness at the expense of small farmers throughout Iowa. Their profits have gone sky high while normal Iowa farmers struggle and lose out", says Chris Peterson, President of the Iowa Farmer’s Union, also a signatory. "We’ve lost tens of thousands of family farms since NAFTA, while agribusiness, with their unsustainable and unhealthy practices, can use unfair trade rules to challenge increased inspections of unsafe imports and blocks other efforts to create safe food systems."
Other points in the groups’ statement include calls for: Increased transparency and accountability in the trade negotiations process, for vigorous enforcement of current trade deals to protect American workers and manufacturers, and for immediate action to balance our severely lopsided trade deficit.
The Iowa Fair Trade Campaign is compiling the presidential campaigns’ responses to its proposals and will publicize them on its website.