A rash of bilateral free trade and investment agreements is spreading quietly and quickly across the planet. But peoples' movements in a growing number of countries are mobilising to fight and neutralise them.


September 2004

Dear friends and colleagues,

We would like to invite you to participate in a new collaborative website to support the struggle against bilateral free trade and investment agreements:
www.bilaterals.org.

Bilaterals?

Since the early 1990s, well before the collapse of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks in Cancun, the US has been aggressively pushing bilateral free trade and investment agreements on countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific. Other powerful governments, like the European Union, Canada, Switzerland and Japan, are doing the same, especially as the direction and pace of WTO talks remain uncertain. Meanwhile, a number of governments in the global South, like India and Thailand, are pursuing bilateral trade and investment agreements with each other.

Bilateral deals create specific obligations on a range of issues, from investment to intellectual property rights. They are used to get faster, deeper and more comprehensive commitments than is possible in a slow and fractious global forum like the WTO. Many so-called free trade agreements
(FTA) have little to do with trade and much to do with politics. The US recently signed a trade pact with Morocco not so much to open markets there, but to gain political leverage in the Arab world. Corporate lobby groups call the shots in these "negotiations", which are conducted in secret. While bilaterals have attracted far less attention than multilateral trade talks, their provisions often go much further and better resemble the radical blueprint of the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). There are over 2,000 bilateral investment treaties (BITs) in force and the number of FTAs is rising by the month.

The impacts are severe. For example, a growing number of companies are now using BITs to sue governments for actions or omissions which they claim interfere with their right to make a profit. Former Enron subsidiary Azurix is leaning on a US-Argentina BIT to sue Argentina for US$550 million over a dispute involving a contract to run a privatised water system in Buenos Aires province. In Bolivia, after a people's struggle reversed the privatisation of Cochabamba's water supply, Bechtel/Aguas del Tunari is claiming US$25 million from the government under a Netherlands-Bolivia BIT.

Be they free trade agreements, investment treaties, economic partnership pacts or others, bilateral agreements are effective, hidden tools to secure new privileges and wealth for large corporations outside the control of the multilateral system. And they are being used to advance the geopolitical interests of powerful governments at the expense of social, political, economic and ecological justice for the majority of the world's peoples.

Why bilaterals.org?

From Australia to Ecuador to Thailand, people's movements, NGOs, indigenous peoples and trade unions have mounted strong opposition to bilateral trade and investment agreements. In Korea earlier this year, farmers clashed with riot police over an impending FTA with Chile, which they saw leading to the destruction of their livelihoods through a flood of cheap Chilean produce benefiting only transnational agribusiness. In Australia, the public has been enraged by the government's "selling out" of the national generic drug system under the new US-Australia FTA for the benefit of US companies.
Whether the issue is food, water, health, job security, the environment, the future of the media or national sovereignty, these deals are creating dangerous new rules and realities. We need to deepen our understanding of these processes and learn from each others' experiences in different countries in order to build stronger movements against these instruments of neoliberal globalisation.

Those campaigning against bilateral trade and investment deals have often found it difficult but necessary to link up with others to compare notes, share analysis and develop broader strategies. With that in mind, several organisations agreed to start a collaborative and open website as a space where people with access to the internet can do that. This website is collective, meaning no one owns it and everyone is welcome to participate.
It is an open-publishing site, so anyone can post their own materials to it.
It is really meant to be used by anyone interested in confronting these bilateral agreements and analysing their implications, and strategising on what can be done.

Bilaterals.org is structured simply. It has three main sections: news and reflections about specific negotiations; background analyses of key thematic issues; and access to the texts of bilateral treaties themselves. It also has sections for online discussions, sharing action alerts and links for going further. At present, the site just carries basic starting materials, which we hope will grow with your involvement.

How to participate

To participate, all you need to do is to register as a member of the site.
This will allow you to post documents, photos or links, participate in the discussion forums and be listed as a contact person if you wish. While the site is structured in English, you can post materials in any language. For more details, please go to www.bilaterals.org.

We hope that you will join this initiative and share this message with others in your movements and networks who might be interested.

On behalf of the website initiators,

Aziz Choudry
GATT Watchdog
Member, Board of Convenors, Asia-Pacific Research Network

Renée Vellvé
GRAIN

The groups that have jointly initiated this website are:
- Asia-Pacific Research Network ( http://www.aprnet.org)
- GATT Watchdog, Aotearoa/New Zealand (mailto: notoapec@clear.net.nz)
- Global Justice Ecology Project, USA ( http://www.globaljusticeecology.org)
- GRAIN, international ( http://www.grain.org)
- IBON, Philippines ( http://www.ibon.org)
- XminY, Netherlands ( http://www.xminy.nl)