Guatemalan bishop: Free trade widens gap between rich, poor
Catholic News Service (www.catholicnews.com)
Guatemalan bishop: Free trade widens gap between rich, poor
6/13/2006
TORONTO, Canada - Free trade under the current economic rules can only widen the gap between rich and poor in the Americas, said the head of the Guatemalan bishops’ conference.
"I am not against free trade in its true sense," said Bishop Alvaro Ramazzini Imeri of San Marcos, Guatemala. "But free trade has to be based on equal rules for all players."
Bishop Ramazzini, who also heads a commission formed last year to negotiate mining reform, spoke June 8 at a public meeting at Ryerson University in Toronto.
The bishop said he is afraid that under terms of the Central American Free Trade Agreement, U.S. food products will flood global markets, stifling domestic production for Guatemala.
"The Guatemalan peasant farmer has no social security, no job security; neither does he have access to subsidies, (unlike) the U.S. farmer, who has farming equipment, irrigation systems, and who will inevitably produce more," he said.
On the one hand, the bishop said, industrialized countries are promoting the freer movement of goods throughout the Americas, widening the gap between rich and poor and inciting people to go North for new opportunities. But at the same time, he said, the U.S. government is restricting the free movement of people.
"There is a contradiction in this situation," the bishop said.
Bishop Ramazzini also spoke about the context in which CAFTA was signed last August — hurriedly and without consultation with civil society. Since its signing, the Guatemalan Parliament has not passed legislation to implement the accord, and a group of lawyers petitioned the Constitutional Court, arguing that CAFTA’s provisions are contrary to the Guatemalan Constitution.
Bishop Ramazzini said he hoped the Guatemalan Constitutional Court will rule the accord unconstitutional. If CAFTA is implemented, then the Guatemalan state will relinquish even more of its right to regulate foreign investment, as disputes will no longer be tried in Guatemalan courts, he added.
Foreign investments in Guatemala have shown that not all trade is necessarily advantageous to poor communities, said the bishop.
For example, he said, a gold mine in his diocese run by Montana Exploradora, a subsidiary of the Canadian and U.S. company Glamis Gold Ltd., has started operations although many of San Marcos Ixtahuacan’s mainly indigenous residents claim that there was no adequate consultation with the community, as required by an International Labor Organization convention. The convention sets out the rights of indigenous peoples, stipulating that they must be consulted prior to any development on their lands.
While the mining operations will create a number of jobs for a limited period, the bishop said he wondered whether such jobs were worth the environmental damage and the depletion of an already limited water supply. The company pays only 1 percent of profits to the state; half goes to the central government and half to the local government.
"I say that the profits of mining should be shared, 50-50, between the company and the government. My detractors say that this is not business, and that foreign companies will no longer want to invest here. If that is the case, then it is better that they don’t come to invest under such conditions," Bishop Ramazzini said.
He said his critics say he is opposed to job creation.
"This is not the issue here. The basic issue is one of justice and human dignity and access to natural resources for everyone, to meet everyone’s basic needs - and not just to swell profits on stock exchanges," said the bishop.
