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trade justice
Trinational Solidarity Can Protect Mexican Food Sovereignty From GM Corn
U.S. and Canadian civil society groups are supporting the successful efforts of the “Sin Maíz No Hay País” (“Without Corn There’s No Country”) campaign to protect cultural heritage and biodiversity.
Dec 17, 2023
This coming January 1 marks the 30th anniversary of the trade pact originally known as the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, now called the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. It also marks the 30th anniversary of the historic Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico that denounced the pact over concerns about threats to Indigenous people and food security.
Three decades later, it’s clear the Zapatistas were right.
For Mexico, NAFTA meant abandoning food sovereignty in favor of imports of basic grains, causing an increase in inequality and migration. It meant abandoning the countryside and opening borders to trade, creating a vacuum that organized crime has filled.
Trinational civil society organizations warned 30 years ago that the free trade model could destroy age-old farming traditions. Today they are demanding that Mexico stand up to the pressure of the agribusiness oligopolies and stop what could be the final blow to Mexican food culture.
But, for a handful of transnational agribusiness corporations—such as Bimbo, Maseca, Monsanto, and Cargill—NAFTA has delivered huge profits.
La Jornada reports that, today, food shortages and dependence continue to worsen while imports of basic grains in Mexico are growing to unprecedented levels—accounting for more than half of consumption.
In 2020, the three North American governments renegotiated some aspects of NAFTA. But as La Jornada op-ed coordinator and columnist Luis Hernandez Navarro explained then, “in the agricultural area, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement is more of the same, but worse. It is a central instrument for oligopolies to strip control of farmers’ seeds from those who have developed and cared for them for thousands of years. It’s a key piece of the neoliberal order in the region.”
Thus, under the USMCA, Mexico now has to defend itself tooth and nail against plans of the United States, supported by Canada, to flood the country with genetically modified corn.
Last August, the United States filed a claim under the treaty’s dispute settlement framework over a February 13, 2023, Mexican government decree that prohibits the use of biotech corn in tortillas and dough and phases out its use in all products for human and animal consumption.
The U.S. government charges that Mexico’s anti-GM corn policy lacks sufficient scientific basis and undermines the market access that the country agreed to in the trade treaty.
This attack on Mexican sovereignty has reactivated the trinational solidarity of Mexican, American, and Canadian organizations—a transcontinental bond strengthened in the decades since NAFTA was negotiated behind the people’s backs.
U.S. and Canadian civil society groups are supporting the successful efforts of the “Sin Maíz No Hay País” (“Without Corn There’s No Country”) campaign to protect cultural heritage and biodiversity by preventing the planting of GM corn and the use of the herbicide glyphosate over potential risks to human health, the environment, and the country’s biocultural diversity. In one form of solidarity, they’ve submitted a series of statements to the trade dispute process.
As Karen Hansen-Kuhn of the U.S.-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy puts it, “whether or not the dispute panel accepts these statements, the range of topics covered will enrich the public debate on how trade rules could limit or enable sustainable solutions that promote public health, human rights, and economic opportunities.”
The organizations’ statements emphasize the insufficient research on the safety of GM corn for human consumption and the risks of glyphosate. They also emphasize the contradiction between the U.S. claim against Mexico and other key provisions of the treaty, which the United States should not be treating as mere decorations.
For example, Article 32.5 of the USMCA states that the treaty does not prevent a party from adopting or maintaining a measure that it deems necessary to comply with its legal obligations to Indigenous peoples, as well as protections for biological diversity in the chapter on the environment.
The statements emphasize the cultural and environmental risks of GM corn’s proliferation in Mexico, considering the diversity of over 59 native corn varieties that Indigenous peoples have constantly labored to diversify and adapt. They explain that the Mexican policy does not discriminate against U.S. producers, and in fact, these producers are profiting from increased exports of non-GM corn to Mexico.
A support statement led by Rick Arnold of the Council of Canadians—a network of tens of thousands of members from coast to coast and supported by Common Frontiers, a broad network of Canadian organizations—critiques the cozy relationship between their own government and large agribusinesses.
“As Canada joins the U.S. in challenging Mexico to stop its planned phaseout of genetically modified corn for human consumption,” they write, “a too-close collaboration between federal government departments and the biotechnology industry has been exposed […] CropLife Canada was instrumental in Canada’s new decision to remove regulation from many coming gene-edited GMOs.”
Canadian organizations demand that their government support Mexico in its efforts to gradually eliminate the importation of GM corn, and are calling upon the USMCA dispute panel to rule in favor of protecting health, small farmers, and environmental well-being, as Mexico has done for several millennia.
Trinational civil society organizations warned 30 years ago that the free trade model could destroy age-old farming traditions. Today they are demanding that Mexico stand up to the pressure of the agribusiness oligopolies and stop what could be the final blow to Mexican food culture. Long live international solidarity.
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Biden Should Use the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity to Free the Hemisphere From ISDS
One of the most controversial aspects of the hyperglobalization era, investor-state dispute settlement elevates multinational corporations and foreign investors to equal status with national governments.
Jul 20, 2023
The president’s extended national Bidenomics tour touted the administration’s break with “neoliberal” policies and the resulting increase in wages, manufacturing jobs, and infrastructure investment. That fêete should extend through the month: On July 1, the United States also celebrated an important rollback of one of the most controversial aspects of the hyperglobalization era, the investor-state dispute settlement regime.
Investor-state dispute settlement, or ISDS, elevates multinational corporations and foreign investors to equal status with national governments, empowering them to skirt domestic courts and sue governments before panels of three corporate lawyers to enforce special privileges and rights included in trade and investment agreements. The lawyers can award corporations unlimited sums to be paid by a country’s taxpayers—including for the loss of expected future profits.
Foreign corporations need only convince the tribunals of lawyers that a country’s environmental law, judicial decision, or safety regulation violates their extraordinary investor rights. The tribunals’ decisions are not subject to appeal, and the amount awarded has no limit. After ISDS attacks on critical environmental, energy, health, and even racial justice policies, countries have either paid corporations hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds or rolled back public interest policies.
As a candidate, now-President Joe Biden committed to excluding ISDS from any commercial agreement he negotiated if elected. We urge President Biden to be more ambitious.
Shamefully, it was the U.S. government that was one of the world’s major pushers of ISDS, including by inserting it into the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and then other free trade pacts.
Almost 30 years later, more than $859 million in compensation has been granted to corporations in NAFTA ISDS attacks on oil, gas, water, and timber policies; toxics bans; health and safety measures; and more. This does not include demanded compensation in pending claims, such as the Keystone XL case against the United States through which a Canadian corporation currently seeks $15 billion from U.S. taxpayers over the revocation of a permit to build an oil pipeline across North America.
As the record of outrageous ISDS rulings grew and as the United States faced investor challenges that infuriated members of Congress and state and local officials, more scrutiny was focused on the obscure process few originally even realized was embedded in a dozen U.S. trade pacts.
The fight came to a head during the Obama Administration, which was pushing for a massive expansion of ISDS through the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The two pacts would have empowered tens of thousands of new foreign investors to challenge U.S. policies and demand taxpayer compensation, while also enabling U.S. investors’ ISDS challenges against dozens of countries.
Opposition to ISDS was a major factor for the Obama Administration’s failure to garner a congressional majority for the TPP in the year after it was signed in 2015. The TTIP was sunk by ISDS opposition in Germany, which had been a major ISDS proponent until being faced with billions in claims in two cases filed by Swedish energy firm Vattenfall over improved coal-fired electric standards and phase-outs of nuclear power.
Associations of U.S. local and state government officials voiced their opposition to ISDS, including the U.S. National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), representing the mainly Republican-controlled U.S. state legislative bodies:
“NCSL will not support Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) or Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with investment chapters that provide greater substantive or procedural rights to foreign companies than U.S. companies enjoy under the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, NCSL will not support any BIT or FTA that provides for investor/state dispute resolution.”
The 2018 renegotiation of NAFTA provided the opportunity to begin the U.S. extraction from ISDS liability. Eliminating ISDS has long been a priority demand of congressional Democrats lawmakers while then-U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer opposed ISDS for subsidizing the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing jobs and undermining national sovereignty.
The result was NAFTA’s ISDS was altogether phased out over three years between the U.S. and Canada and its scope and reach drastically reduced with Mexico, as part of the July 1, 2020 U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) that replaced NAFTA.
Much of the world has turned against the ISDS regime as attacks against domestic public interest policies mounted and econometric studies found no proof that countries’ exposing themselves to ISDS liability gained more foreign direct investment.
Numerous countries, starting with South Africa and now including Bolivia, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, and Poland terminated their ISDS-enforced agreements or otherwise reduced their ISDS liability. Brazil refused to enter into such agreements in the first instance.
In 2020, 23 E.U. countries adopted a multilateral treaty to terminate all ISDS treaties among them. And 11 of them, including Germany, France, the Netherlands, and other countries that had previously joined the United States in pushing ISDS worldwide, announced their exit from the ISDS-enforced Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) after ISDS attacks on green energy policies. As a matter of fact, last month the European Commission announced the E.U.’s coordinated exit from the ETC.
As a candidate, now-President Joe Biden committed to excluding ISDS from any commercial agreement he negotiated if elected. We urge President Biden to be more ambitious.
Soon, talks are expected to start for an Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP), a forum Biden launched at the June 2022 Summit of the Americas. The United States should use the APEP process to partner with its neighbors to free the hemisphere of ISDS.
With U.S. leadership, APEP could provide the participating countries Barbados, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay, and the United States a path to liberty from ISDS.
All but two of these countries (Barbados and Canada) have an agreement in force with the United States that includes ISDS. Plus, many have additional investment agreements with ISDS in effect between them. This thicket of deals exposes the countries to multimillion-dollar corporate attacks on public interest policies for a just energy transition and the creation of resilient public health systems that are in the interest of all people in the hemisphere. Recently elected leaders of APEP countries, such as Gabriel Boric in Chile and Gustavo Petro in Colombia, have also expressed opposition to ISDS.
A U.S.-led ISDS exit via APEP would be a true win-win. The U.S. acting in cooperation with its allies would achieve an outcome beneficial to all and strengthen its ties in the hemisphere in doing so. It would be extremely difficult for Biden officials to find a similar opportunity in any other trade negotiation.
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The World Needs Just Green Trade, Not 'Free Trade'
Corporations are using trade and investment treaties to handcuff global and national efforts to save the planet.
Mar 19, 2023
The global economy hit a new milestone in 2022 by surpassing $100 trillion. This expansion, which has experienced only the occasional setback such as the 2020 Covid shutdowns, has been accelerated by trade. The world trade volume experienced 4,300% growth from 1950 to 2021, an average 4% increase every year. This linked growth of the global economy and international trade took off in the 1980s as governments embraced the project of globalization, which prioritized the reduction of barriers to trade such as tariffs.
The mechanism by which globalization spread throughout the world, the key strand of its DNA, has been the "free trade" treaty.
"We've had 30 years of free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties," points out Luciana Ghiotto, a researcher at CONICET-Argentina and associate researcher with the Transnational Institute. "They've created this enormous legal architecture, what one friend of ours calls the ‘corporate architecture of impunity,' which has spread like grass and gives legal security and certainty to capital. It has nothing to do with the protection of human rights or environmental rights."
Indeed, among the many problems associated with the expansion of world trade has been environmental degradation in the form of land, air, and water pollution. More recently, however, attention has turned to the more specific problem of carbon emissions, which are largely responsible for climate change. According to the World Trade Organization, the production and transport of goods for export and import account for 20-30% of global carbon emissions.
Embedded in many of the treaties governing trade and investment are clauses that give corporations the right to sue governments over regulations, particularly those addressing the environment and climate change, that adversely affect the expected profit margins of those businesses. These investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions have a "chilling effect on the regulatory system because governments, worried that they will be sued, decide to delay reforms related to climate change," points out Manuel Perez Rocha, an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. "There have been several cases around the world where companies were able to defeat regulatory changes that favor the climate."
Trade rules that privilege corporations over the environment are particularly influential in the realm of agriculture, which is an extractive industry no less powerful than mining.
"The global system of trade and investment contributes to the monopoly control by just a few transnational corporations over fossil fuel-guzzling agribusiness, whose products are often transported thousands of miles before they reach a dinner table," relates Jen Moore, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. "At the same time. the system has been decisive in making the lives of millions of small-scale farmers more precarious, undermining their role as a better alternative to mass monoculture operations."
Carbon emissions are not the only byproduct of the agribusiness that global trade sustains. "There's also methane emissions," adds Karen Hansen-Kuhn, program director at the Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy. "A lot of methane comes from meat production. Nitrous oxide, which is 265 times more potent than carbon and stays in the atmosphere over 100 years, results from chemical fertilizers."
These perspectives on global trade—and more environmentally sound alternatives to the "free trade" model—were presented at a December 2022 webinar sponsored by Global Just Transition project of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South.
The Rise of "Free Trade"
Throughout the modern era, states throughout the world protected their domestic economies through tariffs on foreign goods and restrictions on foreign investment. Behind these protective walls, states helped local farmers and businesses compete against cheaper imports and deep-pocketed investors.
But states that depended increasingly on exports of cheap industrial goods and surplus food—aided by transnational companies eager to boost their profits—lobbied for the reduction of these barriers. Arguments for "free trade," traditionally linked to the presumed benefits of globalization, emerged within the most powerful economies in the nineteenth century, but it was more recently, in the 1970s, that states and international institutions dramatically revived this discourse under the banner of "neoliberalism."
"When we talk about the circulation of capital, we're talking about trade," explains Luciana Ghiotto. "That is, import and export for states and the circulation of thousands of vessels and planes for the transport of commodities all around the world. One of the aims of capital is to make that circulation faster, simpler, and easier. Who would not want to make trade easier or faster? Well, the state."
Faster and more efficient trade, while more profitable for corporations, also has meant a number of negative consequences for states such as job loss among domestic producers. Because of the wide array of free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties now in force—and the power invested in international bodies to enforce these agreements—states have lost many of the tools they once used to protect or develop national industries.
The spread of the free-trade orthodoxy has had a major impact on the energy industry, which has in turn pushed up carbon emissions. Ghiotto points to the efforts of fossil-fuel corporations to protect their investments in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union as a primary motivation to negotiate an Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) in the early 1990s, which guaranteed a free trade in global energy markets. The ECT was originally signed by 53 European and Central Asian countries. Today, another 30 countries from Burundi to Pakistan are in the queue for membership.
"The ECT is actually a treaty made specially to protect fossil fuel Industries," Ghiotto continues. "It's already been used by investors to protect their investments in the face of state policies. But that was 30 years ago. Now, because of the global climate crisis, states are pushing for other kinds of regulations that are jeopardizing the investments of these corporations."
Energy companies have taken states to dispute settlement in 124 cases, with around 50 against Spain alone because of its reforms in the renewable energy sector. Companies "have used the ECT as a legal umbrella in order to increase business and profits, or simply to protect their investments against state regulation," Ghiotto adds. Italy, for instance, instituted a ban on offshore drilling only to be hit by a suit from the U.K. energy company Rockhopper. In November 2022, the ECT arbitration panel ordered the Italian government to pay the company 190 million Euros plus interest.
"Investors in the mining and oil sector have launched 22% of the claims against Latin American states," she reports. "There was the big case of Chevron against Ecuador. But there have been others. For instance, Ecuador had to pay a $374 million penalty to the French oil company Parenco after the state changed some clauses regarding the amount of taxes the company had to pay in order to give back some of the revenues to the Ecuadorian people."
Agriculture and Climate Change
Global food production generates 17 billion tons of greenhouse gasses every year. That's about a third of the 50 billion tons of such gasses emitted annually. The production of beef and cow milk are the worst offenders, largely because of the methane that's released by the animals themselves. But other major contributors include soil tillage, manure management, transportation, and fertilizer.
"Along with Greenpeace and Grain, our institute has been working with scientists to think about how increased fertilizer use is affecting climate change," Karen Hansen-Kuhn reports. "Fertilizer use has been increasing all over the world. It's a key part of Green Revolution practices. The scientists we worked with found that the use of nitrogen fertilizer, bringing together the natural gas and the energy used in production along with transportation and the impacts in the field, amounts to more than 21% of emissions from agriculture, and it's been growing."
According to a map of excess nitrogen per hectare of cropland, countries like China, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, and Venezuela are using more nitrogen for fertilizers than the crops can even absorb. "This excess contributes to more emissions and causes other problems, for instance with run-off into waterways," she continues. "The incentives right now in the agricultural system are for extreme overproduction, especially around commodity crops, like corn, soybeans, and wheat, which require these cheap chemical inputs."
Many of these commodity crops are produced for export. Netherlands is the world's second-largest exporter of food; China is the second-largest importer of food but also the sixth larger exporter. The challenge is to continue to feed the world while reducing the use of so much fertilizer. "Many countries are advancing important agroecological solutions like crop rotation, using plants that fix nitrogen in the soil, and doing more composting," Hansen-Kuhn adds. "These techniques are under the control of farmers, so they don't rely on imports or trade in these chemical inputs."
Another strategy, embraced by the European Union, has been to use trade rules to reduce the carbon content of imports and exports. "In Europe, they are currently in the process of finalizing a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism," she reports. "The CBAM mostly applies to things like aluminum, steel, and cement, but fertilizer is part of it as well. A lot of firms in Europe are modernizing their plants so they'll be more energy efficient. And they say they need protection in order to do that. Under this plan, fertilizer imports coming from other countries that don't have the same environmental standards would be subject to a fee tied to the price of carbon."
In theory, the CBAM would push exporting countries to raise their environmental standards and/or make their fertilizer production more efficient. "Maybe these plants will become more efficient," she adds. "But maybe some firms will just decide to produce fertilizer in other countries. Or maybe in cases where a country has two factories, it will just export from the efficient factory, and there's no change in emissions."
On top of that, the CBAM will affect countries very differently. "Most of the fertilizer imports into the E.U. come from nearby countries like Russia or Egypt," she continues. "But some imports come from countries like Senegal, where the fertilizer exports to Europe amount to 2-5% of their entire GDP. So, the CBAM would be a huge problem for such countries. And there's nothing in this initiative that would give countries the technology they need to make changes. In fact, there are strong incentives against that in the trade deals. The CBAM provision specifically says that all of the resources generated by the carbon fee will be kept internally to foster the transition within Europe."
Although CBAM may make European trade greener, it may also widen the "green gap" between Europe and the rest of the world. "We need a transition to agroecology, but what we're getting in the trade deals lock in new incentives to continue with business as usual," Hansen-Kuhn concludes. "If we look at the renegotiated NAFTA, there's a new chapter on agricultural biotechnology that streamlines the process for approving both GMOs and products of gene editing. There are also restrictions on seed saving and sharing. And this new NAFTA will probably be the model for other agreements like the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework."
Action at the Global Level
Civil society organizations have been pushing for a legally binding treaty at the U.N. level to make business responsible for human rights violations and environmental crimes connected to their operations.
"Since the U.N. is made up of states, the more industrialized countries who can invest in the world are opposed to such a binding treaty," Luciana Ghiotto points out. "In the United States, Canada, and Japan, we've seen debates about holding companies responsible for human rights violations throughout the production chain. It's a relatively new political process. But it's an example of civil society organizations putting a question of human rights and environmental rights at the center of discussion."
Efforts at the international level are very complicated, Manuel Perez Rocha concedes: "For instance, the World Bank has the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) through which corporations can sue states." He recommends a more regional approach. "We have proposed a dispute resolution center for Latin America that countries could use after pulling out of ICSID. "Unfortunately, most progressive countries have not embraced this," he reports.
One of the challenges to persuading governments to embrace these alternatives is corruption. "There's a tremendous circle of corruption," he adds. "We're talking here about the revolving door where public officials who negotiate these treaties then become private lawyers or counselors or board members of the corporations who are lobbying for their adoption. This corruption helps explain why governments sign these treaties even if they're going to be sued."
He points as well to the issue of access to critical minerals needed in the green energy transition. "The Biden administration is trying to combat fossil fuels at the cost of communities that live around the deposits of critical minerals like lithium and cobalt," Perez Rocha explains. "There are a lot of concerns among native populations about how to make this transition to a so-called clean economy without violating human rights and destroying the environment."
Trade has been a mechanism to make deals around these minerals. "These efforts at near-shoring and friend-shoring have been ways to control the supply chains around minerals and metals," notes Jen Moore. "The United States in particular but also Canada have made themselves clear: to be identified as a 'friend' is to have an FTA or a bilateral investment treaty."
There have been other actions at the global level related to climate issues and jobs. For instance, the United States brought action against India in the WTO in 2014 over domestic content provisions in its effort to boost solar energy. India returned the favor two years later over similar domestic content provisions in state-level solar policy. "The WTO deemed both rules illegal," Karen Hansen-Kuhn recalls. "In the United States, the programs continued, I don't think any changes were made. But when we think of a just transition, it has to be about not just reducing emissions but about creating jobs."
Resistance to Business as Usual
Resistance to the corporate-friendly trade architecture has come from many corners of the globe. "From the perspective of my work with mining-affected people," Jen Moore reports, "there's been a rise in resistance from farmers, indigenous peoples, and other communities facing the detrimental Impacts of this highly destructive model of capitalist development that's been accompanied by violent repression and militarization and often targeted violence against land and environment defenders."
For example, after buttressing the fossil fuel status quo for three decades, the Energy Charter Treaty is no longer unassailable. In November, the German cabinet announced that the country would withdraw from the ECT. It joins a number of European countries—Italy, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Slovenia, and Luxembourg—that have made similar announcements. "In times of climate crisis, it is absurd that companies can sue for lost profits from fossil investments and compensation for coal and nuclear phase-outs," points out the deputy leader of the parliamentary group of the Greens in the German parliament.
The treaty has a surprise for countries that want out: signatories withdrawing from the ECT are still bound by the treaty for 20 years. There's also a related problem involving the provisions of other trade treaties.
"European countries are pushing to update treaties with Mexico, Chile, and others to include clauses like the investor-state dispute mechanism, which also allow energy corporations to sue governments," notes Manuel Perez Rocha. "This is nothing short of neocolonialism being exercised against countries on the periphery." In response, he urges the "strengthening of national judicial systems so that companies will feel more protected by national systems and not pursue options at the supranational level."
The backlash to the ECT is nothing new. "The system has created a lot of resistance and critiques since practically day one," Luciana Ghiotto adds. "I was raised in the spotlight of the battle of Seattle in 1999 against the WTO and the struggles against the Free Trade Area of the Americas."
Karen Hansen-Kuhn agrees that it's necessary to claim victories. "Civil society helped weaken the ISDS system," she notes. "With the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, massive opposition to ISDS was a major reason it fell apart.."
Another form of pushback comes from the field itself. "On our website, we've started tracking the adoption of agroecological approaches, which are not just about the inputs but instead look at the fuller picture including food sovereignty, namely each community's right to choose the food systems it wants," Hansen-Kuhn continues. She points to Mexico phasing out GMO corn, which relies heavily on the pesticide glyphosate. The government made that decision because of input from civic movements. After objections from the U.S. government, Mexico backtracked somewhat on that commitment by applying the phase-out only to corn for human consumption.
"Mexico is making some concessions, for example allowing GMO for animal feed, but otherwise it's standing firm despite enormous pressure," she concludes. "That's not a complete transition to agroecology, but here's a country deciding that it will make a change in a food system regardless of what the trade deals say."
"It's important to recall the totality of the system supporting corporate control around the world," Jen Moore says. "Sometimes it feels like we make only piecemeal attempts to go after it."
Manuel Perez Rocha agrees. "We need to discuss alternatives from different perspectives, which would put an end to the patriarchal, neocolonial capitalist system," he suggests. "But while we strive for a utopian vision, we also should discuss more realistic, more feasible, and more concrete alternatives. For instance, companies can sue states. Why shouldn't states have the right to sue companies? Affected communities should also have access to dispute resolutions. We should eliminate the privileges of foreign investors, like the 'national treatment' clause, that tie governments down in their efforts to promote local, regional, and national development."
The Global South has begun to develop a unified voice in the debate on a just energy transition. "In Latin America, we have said that there is no new green deal with FTAs and bilateral investment treaties," Luciana Ghiotto reports. The region has seen the rise of a number of dynamic organizations from the rural activists in Via Campesina to various indigenous movements and feminist movements articulating a feminist economy. Meanwhile, certain countries have taken the lead. "In its constitution, Ecuador prohibited entry into any international agreements that include international arbitration that compromises the country's sovereignty," she adds. "The new neoliberal government is struggling with dozens of lawyers to find a way around it, but they still can't."
Another example of successful resistance is the growth of the climate justice movement, which goes well beyond environmental protection and has linked activists across struggles from economic justice and human rights to agroecology and post-growth economics.
"After the disruptions of the last couple years, we can come together more in person," Karen Hansen-Kuhn notes. "Movements require building relationships in person. We need to come together to build these alternatives."
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