Courtney McGrailChristians should be concerned about the proposed free trade agreement between the European Union and the United States, writes Jonny Hanson
Jonny Hanson
In the Old Testament book of Exodus, we read of the Israelites’ suffering at the hands of Pharaoh, especially when Moses began agitating for their freedom. Pharaoh suddenly decreed that the Hebrew workforce had to produce the same amount of bricks as they had previously but without straw being provided. What had been a difficult task quickly became a torturous one.
The moral of the story – that the weak suffer when the economically powerful abuse their power – is one repeated throughout the biblical record.
It is a trend that, sadly, continues to this day, via what Pope Francis calls “the new idolatory of money”. And it is also a theme much apparent in the proposed free trade agreement between the European Union and the United States, the so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
There are two main reasons for this, in my view.
Firstly, there is a rush to the bottom in terms of standards in various important areas of life, notably food. Few trade barriers currently exist between the EU and the US and the crux of the matter is really about ‘harmonising’ standards between the two jurisdictions. The problem is that this favours lower US food standards, including on safety, labour rights, animal welfare and environmental protection.
In practice, for consumers, this will mean ready access to American meat fed with growth promoters and hormones, washed with chlorine and lactic acid, containing proven endocrine disrupters and that cannot be tested for a parasitic nematode worm, trichinae.
And for many of our family farms it will mean continued stifling pressure to get bigger or get out of business.
Yet this is at a time when there is a mounting body of evidence that small- and medium-sized farms not only feed the majority of the world, but produce food more efficiently than big ones when measured on a per hectare basis.
The second major concern with the TTIP is that it subverts democracy.
Not only have many of the negotiations been conducted in secret, but civil society organisations that represent the wishes of ordinary people and their everyday lives have been consulted about the proposed deal much less than multinational corporations, who represent the narrow interests of their shareholders.
In addition, the inclusion of something called investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms in the deal would provide legal means for multinational corporations to overrule and sue nation states for introducing legislation that impinged on their investments, such as banning a particularly toxic chemical.
Other examples of previous trade liberalisation agreements provide further evidence on why TTIP is a bad deal for society, and the creation which sustains it. Granted, while there are sometimes unnecessary bits of red tape that can be scrapped, generally speaking, the entire history of trade liberalisation has been potholed with false prophecies and broken promises.
Take Haiti. It used to be largely self-sufficient in rice and dairy products. Then IMF-imposed trade liberalisation meant that it was forced to open its markets to subsidised food from wealthy nations, especially the USA and France. Now it imports most of its rice and dairy products.
What’s more, the many farmers forced off their land by this injustice ended up squatting in shanty towns in Port-au-Prince: no home, no land, no work. When the earthquake struck in 2010, these areas were flattened. The death toll was catastrophic. Trade liberalisation, in this case, literally has blood on its hands, though it was clearly not the only factor to blame.
Liberalisation
Sadly, the devastated lives of ordinary people are the norm and not the exception with much trade liberalisation. It’s a similar story with the Ivory Coast. It was self-sufficient in rice. But after having its markets prised open by yet more trade liberalisation, it ended up importing two thirds of its rice.
The story from the book of Exodus reminds us that power needs to be challenged and held to account, by the Church most of all. In the proud tradition of Moses and the prophets, we cannot pick and choose when to apply our biblical mandate for justice.
We cannot passionately campaign against unfair trade in the Global South and then dispassionately ignore it on our own doorstep, something Pope Franics describes as the “globalisation of indifference”.
But we can indeed remember that business involves relationships between real people and with God’s creation, that the economy should exist to create a flourishing world for everyone and everything, and that all trade should be, can be, must be fair: as Pope Francis puts it in Evangelli Gaudium, “money must serve, not rule!”
Jonny Hanson is a Christian environmentalist and graduate of Queen’s University Belfast Management School.