The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is a trade agreemnt that involves 34 economies in the Western Hemisphere-all the countries in the region with the exception of Cuba. The nine negotiating groups in the agreement include: market access, investment, services, government procurement, intellectual property rights, subsidies, antidumping and countervailing duties, and competition policy.

When FTAA negotiations began in 1998, it was projected that the end date for completing negotiations would be 2005. However, following the 8th FTAA ministerial meeting in Miami, Florida in November 2003, ministers have had little success reaching agreement and the past 3 scheduled ministerial meetings have been postponed.

The FTAA would liberalize trade in goods and services and affect more than 800 million people in the Western Hemisphere, many of them women. Based on the lessons learned from the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the FTAA would further threaten the lives and livelihoods of women across the region. Women maquiladora workers in the region are already forced to work in poor conditions, face harassment, and receive low pay and little, if any, benefits. Increased foreign direct investment in this area under the FTAA would increase the power of foreign firms and reduce governments' ability to regulate investment and uphold social protections for their workers.

The FTAA also threatens to privatize essential public resources such as health and water and this would increase the burdens on women throught the region who are responsible for providing and protecting these services for their families and communities. The proposed FTAA would also increase agriculture subsidies and encourage dumping of goods by big agribusiness firms in local markets throughout the region. This would drive family farmers out of business and increase the number of female-headed households as men are forced into cities or to migrate in order to find work. It would also cause women to leave the farm and seek employment in the insecure informal sector or the exploitative maquiladora sector.

These are just some of the potential impacts of the proposed FTAA that is currently being negotiated.

The IGTN has taken a critical stand against the FTAA since its inception and has participated in a number of NGO parallel events at past ministerial meetings. IGTN's regional networks in Latin America and the Caribbean are also active in educating women and communities and also trade negotiators about the gender impact of trade policies such as the FTAA  and are engaged in continuous advocacy at all levels to prevent the negotiating countries from agreeing to a trade agreement that will undermine development in the region.

The following documents address the gendered impacts of the FTAA on women in the hemisphere.

IGTN at Miami: Advocacy Position for the Eighth FTAA Ministerial Meeting

Breaking Boundaries II:  The Free Trade Area of the Americas and Women

Additional resources in English and Spanish are available online in the IGTN Resource Library.

Recursos adicionales en Inglés y Español está disponible en línea en la biblioteca del recursos de IGTN y del Capitulo Latino Americano de la Red Internacional de Género a www.generoycomercio.org.