CAFTA Ratified
El CAFTA Ha Sido Ratificado

By Emma Paskewitz
Interview with and conference led by Jorge Pivaral Ortíz.

The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) was ratified by the United States' House of Representatives on July 27th, 2005. The trade agreement will take effect on the first of January, 2006 in the United States and the Central American countries that have ratified it thus far -El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

The vote was extremely close. 217 representatives voted in favour of CAFTA and 215 voted against the agreement. Most of the representatives that voted in favour of CAFTA are republicans. An article in the Diario de Centro América says that democrats believe that CAFTA doesn't sufficiently protect workers rights in Central America.
There is reason for why democrats voted the way they did. CAFTA does not require that the countries involved with CAFTA pass workers' rights and environmental protection laws that meet the standards of international laws.
The lack of effective human rights laws would increase the number of American companies that move to areas where they can easily exploit workers by paying them less and making them work in unhealthy conditions.
Protecting the environment is extremely important, but it is especially important in Central American countries. Central American countries contain 8% of the world's biodiversity. This means that there are thousands of plant and animal species, and other natural resources in the region that need to be protected. It's crucial that we pay attention to the natural resources in Central America because severe problems have already been developing. For example, between 1950 and 1990, the region lost more than 70% of its forests.
Besides deforestation, the region also has problems with pollution. The Inter-American Development Bank reported that almost 75% of the population of Central America lives in areas where the pollution slows productivity, increases violence and damages public health. As a result of NAFTA, an equivalent of CAFTA between Mexico, Canada and the United States, Mexico has ones of the worst deforestation rates in the Western Hemisphere. The cause of this deforestation was that when the agriculture sector changed as a result of the entrance of American corn into the market, 1.5 million farmers had to leave their land. They then had to tear down more forests in order to start new farms and in order to have fuel.
So what will happen in January? We don't know how quickly the above mentioned impacts will show their ugly faces. Jorge Pivaral Ortíz believes that some of the first American products that will appear on the Central American markets are vegetables, beer and textiles. He says that afterwards, the Central American markets will see the gradual disappearance of taxes on American paper products and medicines. Following the entrance of more American products and companies, many damaging effects develop.
Besides the effects of CAFTA on workers' rights and on the protection of the environment, it will have many effects on the lives of the poor people of Guatemala, like the small farmers and the indigenous populations. Jorge Pivaral Ortíz believes that CAFTA will affect the indigenous people more severely than other groups of people. The situation in Guatemala shows why this is so.
The indigenous population represents 60% of the Guatemalan population as a whole, and the majority of the indigenous are poor. CAFTA will affect their communities because the majority of them live in rural areas and are small-scale farmers. They will not be able to compete with the low prices of American products, and many of them will lose their jobs and their ability to make money by selling their crops on the market. As a result, some of them will be among the first people that end up having to work for America companies under bad conditions and for bad pay. They will also be more directly affected by increasing deforestation rates and pollution because they live in the rural areas that will be changing due to the new factories.
In conclusion, we have another trade agreement in this hemisphere that has no regard for workers' rights, the environment or the poor people of Central America, especially the indigenous people. CAFTA is about power and politics. Free trade might be appealing to a small portion of society, but the bad impacts that free trade has on the majority definitely outweigh the benefits that it gives to the minority.