Stop CAFTA

As marches in El Salvador today call attention to the negative effects of the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), social organizations in Costa Rica struggle to prevent a similar sequence of events in their country. Tens of thousands of Costa Ricans participated Monday in a peaceful protest against the DR-CAFTA in the capital city of San José, with parallel marches taking place across the country.

Costa Rica is the only country signed on to the DR-CAFTA that has not yet ratified the agreement. A broad sector of civil society, gathered under the National Front of Support to the Struggle Against the FTA, calls for the legislature to drop the trade agreement for a future “forged on a development model that does honor to our best democratic, civil and pacifist traditions.”

Opponents of the DR-CAFTA—among them workers from the nationalized telecommunications and insurance agencies, representatives from the public universities, teachers, farmers, fishermen, and students—foresee serious negative impacts for Costa Rica’s economy and quality of life if the treaty were to become law.

In El Salvador, the first country to implement the DR-CAFTA on March 1, 2006, similar fears have become reality. Press reports from El Salvador show that between 2005 and 2006 El Salvador’s trade deficit increased by 24%. An estimated 93,000 jobs have been lost in the agricultural sector in the past year as farmers are unable to compete with heavily subsidized United States imports.

“While a flood of U.S. imports is devastating the agricultural sector, an estimated 60,000 families in the urban informal sector are being hit just as hard by intellectual protectionism ushered in by DR-CAFTA,” said Emily Carpenter of US-El Salvador Sister Cities.

Civil society organizations in Central America and the United States have pledged to continue monitoring the social and economic implications of the DR-CAFTA, as producers, vendors, and citizens struggle to cope with its effects. The Stop CAFTA Coalition, based in the United States, has released a detailed monitoring report of the DR-CAFTA’s first year, available at www.stopcafta.org, and plans to release a second monitoring report later this year.

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