Organizations Demand Candidates Specify What U.S. Trade Policy Will Look Like During their Presidency
* Link to Full Letter: & Signatory List www.iowafairtrade.org/blog/?p=134
Des Moines, Iowa – Over two dozen labor, faith, family farm and consumer groups are calling on Presidential candidates to reject the current NAFTA/WTO trade model and make public their agendas for global trade under the next administration. The groups specifically are calling for candidates to reject corporate trade deals that permit challenges to domestic food safety and environmental laws, encourage the offshoring of millions of good jobs throughout America and devastate family farm income.
The diverse groups today released the Iowa Fair Trade Statement, a comprehensive model to ensure the next generation of trade deals don’t have the devastating impact of current trade deals based on the NAFTA/WTO model.
“Sure it’s about jobs but it also about democracy and the public good”, said Mark Smith, President of the Iowa AFL-CIO. “Unfair trade laws stop us from enacting policies like ‘Buy America’, or other practices that could address the jobs issue and restrict our options in making policy in the interest of working people.”
Corporate trade agreements like NAFTA have also had a devastating impact on family farm income, which fell over 16% during the first eights years of the agreement, which has led to the loss of over 300,000 American family farms since 1993.
“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 these kinds of trade rules to challenge efforts to create safe food systems and to increase inspections of unsafe imports.”
Chief among the groups’ concerns are mechanisms in current trade deals that allow companies to challenge democratically determined public interest policies if corporations feel the laws interfere with company profits. Pending cases include challenges to laws banning a cancer-causing gasoline additive and a U.S. effort to block imported beef potentially infected with mad cow disease.
As part of the Iowa Fair Trade Statement, the groups called on candidates to enact policies that:
Increase transparency and accountability in the trade negotiations process, for vigorous enforcement of current trade deals to protect American workers and manufacturers, and immediate action to balance our severely lopsided trade deficit.
“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.”
* Link to Full Letter: & Signatory List www.iowafairtrade.org/blog/?p=134