Big Colombia Strike Highlights Free Trade Fail
Big Colombia Strike Highlights Free Trade Fail first appeared on the Campaign for America’s Future blog, where you can read the full article.
There is a big strike in Colombia, and you probably don’t know about it. Farmers and others are protesting over a variety of grievances, including the devastating effect of free trade agreements, privatization and inequality-driven poverty. Corporate-owned American media is not covering it. These trade agreements make the really rich really richer while outsourcing jobs to places where people can’t object to the low pay and working conditions. This undercuts wages here. The end result is a race to the bottom.
The Strike
The BBC is reporting that 200,000 Colombian farmers are on strike in 11 of Colombia’s 32 provinces. They are blocking roads, cutting off the central province. The Economist reports that “Colombian miners, truckers, coffee growers, milk producers, public health-care workers, students and others” took to the streets on Aug. 19.
Almost the only American outlet covering this strike is the Miami Herald. Last week the paper reported:
The agrarian strike, as it’s known, is broad-based and far-flung. Coffee, cacao, potato and rice farmers have joined ranks with cargo truckers, gold miners and others. Teachers and labor unions are also joining in. Their demands are equally ample, calling for reduced fuel and fertilizer prices, the cancellation of free trade agreements, increased subsidies and the end of a crackdown on informal mining operations, among others.
Reasons for Strike
According to the Herald report, free trade agreements are part of the reason for the strike. “Javier Correa Velez, the head of a coffee-growers association called Dignidad Cafetera,”…“High fuel prices, expensive agro-chemicals, government neglect of rural areas and free trade agreements—without adequate safeguards—have made it impossible for farmers to compete, he said.”
A Miami Herald report the next day also says that the strikers are demanding an end to free trade agreements.
Common Dreams has more in Colombia Nationwide Strike Against ‘Free Trade,’ Privatization, Poverty. Common Dreams reports:
“[The strike is a condemnation] of the situation in which the Santos administration has put the country, as a consequence of its terrible, anti-union and dissatisfactory policies,” declared the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), the country’s largest union, in a statement.
[. . .] Meanwhile, the Colombian government is handing out sweetheart deals to international mining companies while creating bans and roadblocks for Colombian miners. Likewise, the government is giving multinational food corporations access to land earmarked for poor Colombians. Health care workers are fighting a broad range of reforms aimed at gutting and privatizing Colombia’s health care system. Truckers are demanding an end to low wages and high gas prices.
Labor Murders in Colombia
Labor “strife” is not new to Colombia. In February 2012, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka sent a letter asking President Obama to delay the implementation of the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, because of continuing murders of labor activists.
The letter states that through January, one union member was killed by Colombian troops, a second was shot to death along with his wife, a third worker was “brutally murdered” and a fourth union member employed by the National Industry of Sodas (Coca-Cola) was “murdered by gunfire.”
More than 2,900 union members have been murdered in Colombia over the past 25 years….
The Common Dreams report drives this home:
Colombia is the deadliest country in the world for union activists, according to the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, and 37 activists were murdered in Colombia in the first half of 2013 alone, leading news weekly Semana reports.
Effect of U.S.–Colombia Agreement
The U.S.–Colombia Trade Agreement went into effect in May 2012. A year later, The Nation carried the story, The Horrific Costs of the U.S.–Colombia Trade Agreement, describing the consequences on Colombia’s poor and farmers. The new agreement forces Colombian farmers “to compete against heavily subsidized U.S. products” and an Oxfam report estimates “that the average income of 1.8 million grossly under-protected small farmers will fall by 16 percent.” “The study concludes that 400,000 farmers who now live below the minimum wage will see their incomes drop by up to 70 percent and will thus be forced out of their livelihoods.”
And the threats and murders continue. According to a May Public Citizen report on the effects of the recent Korea, Colombia and Panama trade agreements,
In the year after the launch of the Labor Action Plan, union members in Colombia received 471 death threats—exactly the same number as the average annual level of death threats in the two years before the plan. At least 20 Colombian unionists were assassinated in 2012, according to the data relied upon under the Labor Action Plan, while the International Trade Union Confederation reported the assassination of 35 unionists.…In addition, violent mass displacements of Colombians increased 83 percent in 2012 relative to 2011, when the U.S. Congress passed the FTA, adding to the 5 million Colombians who have been displaced in the world’s largest internal displacement crisis.
The Colombian trade agreement is hurting Colombia’s small farmers and they are reacting. They are pitted against America’s giant, industrialized, government-subsidized farms and losing the battle. And in America these giant, corporate farms largely only enrich the 1%, providing low wages for the rest and forcing smaller American farmers out of business as well.
