Right now, our government is negotiating secret trade deals that will
affect our food and water. But while these deals are secret from the
public, corporations have a seat at the table. “Free Trade” Is
Really a Corporate Giveaway So-called “free trade” deals like
NAFTA, and now the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Trans Atlantic
Free Trade Agreement, are really giveaways for corporations that
undermine laws that protect people’s access to safe food and clean
drinking water. They hand over control to companies that want to
import food cheaply, from countries that have fewer food safety
regulations; or to companies that want to override local control over
measures that ban fracking or make it easier to privatize municipal
water systems. How Trade Deals Give Up Our Democracy Under these
deals, corporate interests can challenge our commonsense
environmental, public health and food safety regulations as “trade
barriers” in secret trade tribunals. With global trade, corporate
profits too often override our democratically enacted laws. The
Pitfalls Of A Global Food Supply Global trade undermines government
policies that protect local farmers’ livelihoods, help countries
maintain food self-sufficiency and preserve the environment for future
generations. It also carries risks for U.S. consumers, as not all
countries have robust food safety systems, and trade deals increase
the amount of food we import. But U.S. regulators can’t keep up. For
instance, the U.S. inspects less than 2 percent of the seafood it
imports. These deals also imperil common-sense food labeling—like
labels that tell us where our food comes from—and other consumer
protections that threaten corporate bottom lines. What’s more,
international trade bodies such as the World Trade Organization have
facilitated the global corporate agribusiness network that prizes
cheap processed foods and feed for factory farms from GMO soybeans and
corn. Large-scale industrial cultivation of these crops has devastated
the environment in places from the Midwest to the Amazon. And, most of
these soy and corn crops are genetically engineered—reliant on huge
amounts of herbicides like RoundUp, which the World Health
Organization has classified as a probable human carcinogen. We need
local food systems that support people, farmers and the
environment—not global food systems that prioritize corporate
profits over the health and safety of people.
