September 17, 2004

Cheri Honkala and Jen Cox are participating in the Tri-National Colloquium: NAFTA After Ten Years: Social Impact and Future Perspectives, which is being held at the University of Quebec at Montreal. Where today Cheri will speak about the effects of NAFTA on public services in the USA.

The colloquium is being organized by the Quebec Network for Continental Integration (RQIC), the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade (RMALC), the Hemispheric Social Alliance (HSA), the Alliance for Responsible Trade (ART-US) and Common Frontiers (Canada).

The colloquium opened with six speakers: Dorval Brunelle of the Observatory of the Americas; Hector de la Cueva, of RMALC from Mexico; Thea Lee of the AFL-CIO and ART in the US; Rafael Freire Neto, from the HSA in Brazil; Ghislain Picard of the Assembly of First Nations, Quebec/Labrador; and John Foster of Common Frontiers from Canada.

The panelists talked about the ways in which the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), now in its tenth year, has left lower wages, impoverishment, landlessness, unemployment, increased hunger and homelessness and other economic and environmental crises in its wake in ALL three countries: the US, Canada and Mexico. As Thea Lee of the AFL-CIO and ART pointed out, it is not particular countries who have benefitted and others that have lost as a result of NAFTA, it is groups of people in different countries that have lost or benefitted. NAFTA has destroyed the lives and livelihoods of millions of farmers, workers and the poor across North America, while enriching a small number of very wealthy and powerful corporations and individuals from all three countries.

Every panelist spoke about the widespread opposition to NAFTA that has grown across the hemisphere, and that it is NAFTA and similar trade policies, suchas the FTAA and CAFTA, that has led to a greater international unity of movements of poor and working people, farmers and others.

Speakers spoke of the ways in which NAFTA has weakened and threatened democracy, human rights and independent media. In closing the evening, John Foster of Common Frontiers in Canada asked why the gap in rich and poor is growing so much faster in the United States than in Canada. He made reference to the Social Charter of the Peoples which has been introduced in the Organization of American States (OAS) to place resolving poverty and social inequality at the center of inter-American affairs.

He closed the evening by insisting that we must place Economic, Social and Cultural (ESC) Human Rights at the center of all debates in North America.

Today, the colloquium continues with Thematic Conferences in which Cheri Honkala will be presenting. Tomorrow, Cheri will be one of the closing speakesrs of the colloquium, representing the US.