Full Text of the CAFTA Agreement (Available here)

interaction.org ^ | 2002

[B4Ranch]

CAFTA Central American Free Trade Agreement

This is a 765 page document. If you would like to read it. Click here

CAFTA is not a simple trade agreement. CAFTA was negotiated behind our backs and it is based on a logic that favors profit over human rights and sustainability.

CAFTA gives us three big winners: the three agribusiness firms that control 82% of the world grain trade. Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill profits increased for ADM from $110M to $301M and Cargill’s from $468M to $827M. But since 1984 the real price of food has remained constant while the price farmers receive has fallen by 38%.

If implemented CAFTA would transform privileges for multinational company into rights that would have legal precedence over all secondary legislation in those countries.

Free trade can only be among EQUAL partners. U.S. subsidizes the big agribusiness plus distribution.

From Why We Say No to CAFTA from the Bloque Popular Centroamerico – (yes, from the Central American countries that we are told should benefit) that CAFTA would be the nail in the coffin of Central American Agriculture. Small Central American farmers will be forced out of business by the flood of cheap subsidized goods coming from the United States.

Investor rights or human right? Under CAFTA investments it will be left to the market. National investors treated the same as domestic; prohibits the use of performance requirements; limits the local government’s ability to impose regulations on foreign investors; allow foreign corporation to sue local governments; limit control of local and national governments control of public services such as water, education and other basic rights.

Presently the CAFTA Central American countries receive their main income from United States remittances. This enslaves the illegals here and the citizens in their home countries.

I have never read or studied anything in my life that has no redeeming qualities. It appears that a few multinational companies will starve or enslave 80% of the world’s population with this plan.

We must not endorse CAFTA.

We must secure our borders.

[EagleUSA]

We must not endorse CAFTA.

We must secure our borders.
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Says it all.

[SunnyD1182]

"This is a 765 page document."

And I thought the European Union constitution was bad.

[snowsislander]

I think the link is here.

[Donald Meaker]

You don't need a hundred pages of legal mumbojumbo for free trade. A very few lines that forbid certain mercantile trade laws is plenty.

How many pages is the CAFTA treaty? That gives you your answer.

[DuckFan4ever]

Free trade is a good thing. Agreements are necessarily long. Worker rights enforcement in Central America is good for everyone.

[Vn_survivor_67-68]

NAFTA was sold as the soltion to poverty in and illegal immigration from Messico.......CAFTA will be even more horrific to America than NAFTA.

[Jaysun]

I'm behind CAFTA. I just wish they hadn't felt it necessary to make special protections for American sugar because the trade off wasn't worth it.

[1rudeboy]

NAFTA was sold as the soltion to poverty in and illegal immigration from Messico . . . . [sic]

Is that why the text of NAFTA mentions neither? /sarc

[SunnyD1182]

"Free trade is a good thing. Agreements are necessarily long. Worker rights enforcement in Central America is good for everyone."

Yeah, kind of like the "worker rights enforcement" that NAFTA provided for, say, Mexico, or what free trade provides for sweatshops in Asia. Workers rights, indeed!

[Just A Nobody]

Here it is!

[Ben Ficklin]

Everyone that supports human rights and sustainability over profits, please raise your right hand so that the representatives from Earth Justice and Public Citizen will be able to identify you.

[EagleUSA]

How many pages is the CAFTA treaty? That gives you your answer.
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I am afraid the trusting American people are being had, big time -- with these so-called treaties, that are just coverups for massive, ego-centric, political agendas to unite the Americas....I will put cash on this one!

[hedgetrimmer]

Worker rights enforcement in Central America is good for everyoneM

CAFTA establishes the United Nations ILO to be the arbiter of all labor issues in CAFTA countries. Since the US will be a CAFTA country if this treaty is approved, then the ILO becomes the source of labor law in this country. If you are a patriotic American and believe that the United States Constitution is the supreme law of the land, then you cannot accept this treaty as law, and it must not be passed.

Even if you aren't a patriotic American, but a person of high ethical standards, you cannot allow the United Nations any more power, especially in our hemisphere. The United Nations is an incredibly corrupt organization, whose ministers come from socialist, communist and totalitarian dicatorship countries. If America is to remain a free country, our leadership cannot sell us out wholesale to the United Nations as it will do in this treaty and as it has done in past treaties.

CAFTA must be stopped.

[hedgetrimmer]

CAFTA has nothing really to do with sugar. Sugar is just a convenient boogeyman for the mainstream media to use to make the people angry and support CAFTA out of anger. If you read form USTR Robert Zoellicks speech of May 16 you will see that the purpose of CAFTA is to merge the the Central American countries with the North American Community, and ultimately the whole hemisphere. If our sellout leaders accomplish this, what form of government do you think the US will take? Certainly the Constitution will no longer apply because the "traders" are implenting through treaty and foreign aid a type of "civil society" where a corporatist fascism reigns and the voice of the people becomes the voice of the NGO.

This corporatist fascism is apparent in the lack of enforcement of US borders, the governmental elites( and it galls me that in America we have come to have an elite "class" in our government contrary to the purposes of our founders)find it convenient to ignore their duty to protect the country from invasion, and to uphold laws that they passed that deal with immigration and the permission to work in this country.

[hedgetrimmer]

sustainability over profits

I guess you'd better shut down the federal government then. It has been on track for sustainable development since Clinton signed the EO that created the Presidents council on sustainable development. The EPA, the USDA, the US treasury department, the US state department and the department of transportation are all on the "sustainable" bandwagon. In fact, sustainability is a criteria that the "working groups" created to implement the CAFTA agreements in Central America. You'll find "sustainability" endemic in the language of the "trade and aid" agreements our out of control government elites are pushing.

[processing please hold]

We must not endorse CAFTA.

We must secure our borders.

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Says it all.

Says it all.

[processing please hold]

Bookmarked.

[hedgetrimmer]

How to sell a "trade agreement" that the American people don't want.

``The name of the agreement is perhaps misleading because it's not at all like Nafta,'' Portman said. ``I try to call it Cafta-DR or DR-Cafta so that they don't rhyme.''
--U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman

Mr. Portman was unanimously approved by Congress when nominated for this position.