www.progressive.org
May 12, 2000
No NAFTA for Africa.
The Africa Growth and Opportunity Act just sailed through Congress, but
this NAFTA for Africa bill will provide growth and opportunity for U.S.
corporations, while deepening the misery of millions of Africans.
In exchange for the lowering of tariffs on some textiles to the United
States, African countries will be forced to throw open their economies to
U.S. corporations. Their natural resources must be made available to U.S.
investors , like ExxonMobil, Enron, and Freeport McMoran.
To qualify for lower tariffs, they will also have to cut corporate taxes,
reduce their public sectors (including in areas of education and health),
and orient their economies even more for export, which will make them more
susceptible to the vicissitudes of world trade.
These are the usual prescriptions of the IMF, only this time Congress
skipped the middleman.
"This is one of the most offensive bills I've ever seen," says Lori
Wallach, director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. "These unilateral
conditions that Congress imposed on African nations have not been imposed
on any other countries."
If Congress were really interested in helping the people of Africa, it
would have done two things: forgiven Africa's debts to the United States,
and joined the fight against the scourge of AIDS on that continent.
It did neither.
African countries such as Uganda spend five times as much on debt repayment
as they do on health and education. These debt repayments are sinking
economies and jeopardizing the well-being of millions of people.
Jesse Jackson Jr., Democrat of Illinois, had introduced a substitute bill
last fall that included debt forgiveness, but it got nowhere.
AIDS in Africa is an epidemic of biblical proportions: To date, 13 million
people have died from AIDS; 5,500 die from AIDS every day; and 23 million
are infected with HIV.
So what did Congress do about this?
It stripped from the current bill an amendment by Senators Russ Feingold,
Democrat of Wisconsin, and Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, that
would have required the U.S. government not to penalize African nations
that wanted to provide more affordable AIDS drugs, even if those drugs were
made by U.S. pharmaceuticals.
(President Clinton, to his credit, issued an executive order this week to
make the Feingold-Feinstein language the law of the land after Congress
dropped the ball.)
For Congress to say it is helping Africa with this bill is a joke.
As Senator Feingold noted, "Unless we get serious about reducing Africa's
debt burden and fighting the region's devastating HIV/AIDS crisis, any
effort to stimulate trade and investment is simply an act of political
theater."
The theater got more absurd when Congress slipped in a favor for the
Chiquita banana company and its CEO Carl Lindner. The bill will more
severely punish the European Union over a banana dispute it lost before the
World Trade Organization.
Here's the background: While the United States exports no bananas, it
represented Chiquita before the World Trade Organization in 1996. (Lindner
gave $500,000 to the Democratic Party two days after the Clinton
Administration filed a complaint on its behalf at the WTO.)
Not content with the WTO sanctions against the Economic Union, which
amounted to U.S. tariffs on luxury European goods like expensive cheeses,
Lindner got Congress to squeeze harder: The bill will allow the United
States to impose tariffs on different kinds of European goods--and not just
luxuries--every two months in a rolling fashion. Lindner's hope is that by
hurting many European sectors, these tariffs will bring enough pressure to
bear on the EU that it will cave in to his demand to have free rein in the
former European colonies of the Caribbean.
"This is the tommy gun of trade sanctions against Europe, and it's his
doing that any of this happened," says Wallach.
(Lindner and his American Financial Group, by the way, gave $795,000 in
soft money to the Democrats and Republicans in 1999, according to the
Center for Responsive Politics.)
So the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act gives big breaks to Chiquita and
ExxonMobil, while African nations get no relief from the yoke of AIDS and
debt.
With more trade victories like this, Africa will soon be lost.
--Matthew Rothschild
Louis Proyect
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