With all the excitement down in Washington these days—trillion-dollar tax cuts, tense confrontations with foreign powers—it is easy to miss a little item like an interhemispheric free trade agreement. Easy to miss, but crucial to watch: the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) has become a top priority of the new Bush Administration. FTAA? Trade agreement? Big acronym—big deal. Eyes glaze over.

But the proposed international treaty could dramatically infringe upon the ability of signatory nation-states to maintain democratic control over economic, health and environmental laws and regulations. This treaty, the most far-reaching trade agreement in history, will see intensive negotiations in Quebec over the weekend of April 20-22. In essence, the Bush Administration seeks to extend the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to all of the Americas by 2003; if ratified, the FTAA could compromise the potential for democratic self-government of over 800 million people on two continents.

Hyperbole? Not at all. The FTAA is based in part upon the innovations in international trade law crafted under NAFTA, which has developed an extensive track record since its ratification in 1993. To get a sense of the potential impact of the FTAA, we can start by looking at what provisions the FTAA is importing from NAFTA and the effect these provisions have already had under the latter agreement.

First, the FTAA, like NAFTA, would govern not only disputes between nations but also disputes between investors and nation-states. Corporations gained for the first time in Chapter 11 of NAFTA an institutional mechanism through which suits can be filed against foreign governments.

Second, the FTAA, like NAFTA, would expand the jurisdiction of trade agreements well beyond the traditional realm of tariffs: corporations can sue foreign governments for taking “measures tantamount to nationalization or expropriation” of an investment. Such measures can include health, safety, environmental and labor protection laws. Who gets to decide which laws and regulations are “tantamount to expropriation”? Under NAFTA and under the would-be FTAA, when an investor sues a government the case is submitted not to a national court but to an international tribunal that holds private proceedings and is not required to accept any input from the public.

What has been the impact of these provisions under NAFTA? In 1998, an Ohio-based hazardous waste disposal company won a suit for $20 million against Canada for expropriation of its business due to a Canadian ban on the import of PCBs, a highly toxic coolant used in electrical transformers. The same year, another U.S. corporation filed suit against Canada, claiming a law passed by the Canadian Parliament (which had banned the use of the gasoline additive and potentially harmful neurotoxin MMT) was a “measure tantamount to expropriation.” The Canadian government, hearing that it was likely to lose the case before a NAFTA tribunal, settled out of court for $15 million. Such cases should inspire concern among citizens due to the precedent they set. Are the validity of health, safety and environmental laws to be decided by elected representatives—or by unelected and secretive tribunals?

One might wonder why we might want to apply such a destructive trade agreement to the entire hemisphere. According to the most recent FTAA ministerial declaration, the economic integration achieved through the FTAA would help in “strengthening democracy, creating prosperity and realizing human potential.” The evidence from NAFTA shows the emptiness of such rhetoric. But the FTAA would not stop at simply extending NAFTA to the Americas—its provisions would be much more extensive.

Take, for example, trade in services, which was not extensively covered in NAFTA. A leaked Oct. 7 1999 FTAA Negotiation Group report indicates that the U.S. is intent on liberalizing trade in services, including publicly-funded services like social security, health care and education.