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Trade Matters

Program Description

Trade Matters, a campaign of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), works to ensure that trade systems are evaluated not simply on their contribution to economic growth, but also on their impact on the lives of people-especially the most vulnerable populations.

The campaign uses a human rights lens to monitor six trade agreements and examine whether they improve the lives of workers and immigrants, and protect democracy and public goods. 

With staff in five AFSC offices across the United States we work at the grassroots level -- and on national and global policy. Our focus is on promoting fair trade alternatives and engaging AFSC constituents in trade-related activism.

While existing trade systems tend to reproduce current power relations and entrench historic inequities, we believe it is possible to construct a fair, rules-based world trading system that produces mutual benefit for all parties.

Trade and worker rights

The Trade Matters campaign utilizes an inside-outside strategy to stop the race to the bottom through:

• Monitoring the respect of worker rights in Mexican maquiladoras in collaboration with the Comité Fronterizo de Obreras (CFO)
• Advocating for the implementation and independent monitoring of codes of conduct in key corporations
• Developing proposals to protect workers rights through international agreements that halt the race to the bottom.

Trade and migration

The Trade Matters campaign raises awareness of how trade agreements are one of the root causes of migration in order to:

• Empower new immigrant community leaders and mobilized immigrants who oppose trade agreements that perpetuate the causes of migration
• Increase understanding of the human impacts of the current model of trade agreements that help reduce xenophobia toward immigrants in the US and workers in the Global South
• Encourage policymakers to take a more holistic approach immigration policy.

Trade, democracy and public goods

The campaign works through grassroots organizing, education, and advocacy to:

• Preserve the ability of state and local governments to use government purchasing policies to advance human rights and social justice
• Strengthen the movement against water privatization by linking local water campaigns to fair trade efforts.

Fair trade alternatives

As a way to engage and educate new and existing AFSC constituents, the Trade Matters campaign promotes fair trade products and policy through the sale of the Fair Trade Peace Pack featuring a draw-string bag made by former Levi Straus workers filled with fairly traded products and education materials.

Trade agreements being monitored

The Trade Matters campaign educates on the above themes to mobilize our constituents to get involved in broader advocacy efforts to stop or substantially reform the following trade agreements:

• World Trade Organization (WTO), established in 1995 as the successor to the 1948 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, administers trade agreements, provides a forum for trade negotiations, and monitors national trade policies for the 147 member countries. 
• Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is a proposed ambitious trade agreement between all 34 countries in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean (except Cuba ).
• The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico, and the United States, went into effect in 1994 and created the largest free trade zone in the world.
• Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA or DR-CAFTA) is a pending agreement that has been negotiated between the United States, five Central American countries ( Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua ) and possibly the Dominican Republic.
• Andean Free Trade Agreement (AFTA) is being negotiated between the US, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru (with possibility of including Bolivia at a later time). The talks launched in May of 2004 are to be completed by February 2005-a very aggressive and short timeline.
• US-Southern Africa Customs Union Free Trade Agreement ( US-SACU FTA) negotiations began in June 2003 in order to create the first US free trade area in Africa with Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, and Swaziland.
  

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