Opposition Summary

First and foremost, México wants to express its most sincere sympathy to Indonesia and every moral support regarding the tragedy that struck your country this week. However, the show must go on and we have to conclude this debate. This debate was about if poorer countries should abandon free trade agreements and the debate centered in the following clashing points: Whether Free Trade agreements are fair or not and whether FTAs bring more benefits to poorer countries. Moreover, the opposition side also analyzed the effects of poorer countries leaving free trade agreements, a main point that was not addressed by the proposition and was the case they had to make. The opposition proved the results would be worse and so, leaving FTAs is not an option at all. We then proceeded to another argument: How limited trading capacity was limited when not being part of a free trade agreement and we also presented its evidence. When no free trade agreements are put, it is more difficult to access the market and when there is FTA, there is a better offer in cost, which will lead to more commerce and thus, competitivity for better consumption and so, a better profit with more sells. The oil crisis of 1973 is an evidence that not having facilities to trade can put countries in near-bankruptcy, while in a later point we would go on to proof how an FTA would save you from so. And what is a better facility to trading than FTA. In the beginning of the debate we argued about all of the benefits that free trade brings to us. We talked about economical growth and how it is stimulated by the FTA, more important than that we proved, by referring to the Mexican case followed by a brief description of the situation in Myanmar, that the main difference between two nations is not found in economical status or political regimes, but in the measure of freedom that all of the countries must seek in its fight for achieving identity, basically we defined one of the parameters for achieving development Now, analyzing why the Free Trade Agreements are not even a valid option, we first gave a legal and ethical approach to the matter. Ethics are the basis of societies and breaching an agreement like the Free Trade Agreements. All pacts are to be respected and to suddenly exempt almost every single country (since almost every country is poorer to at least one other) of that is destroying international laws in general. We told you how it goes against the stipulated at the Vienna Convention on International treaties and recalled the non ethics of standing for the cause proposition is standing. The, we proceeded to tell you how Free Trade Agreements provide financial security to the countries and in fact, help on what FTAs are for: Development and stability of the GDPs pf poorer nations and as the introduction of the debate says, it is “a promising solution for development”. We stressed how the proposition had not set out policies on when would the FTAs would be made invalid, since in every single FTA there is always a poorer country and it looks like they made their case for ending FTAs at all. We mentioned how some national industries are created for living out of FTAs and how the World’s FTA with major disparity among involved parties (NAFTA) has not only fostered the development of the “poor” country there (México) but totally saved its economy from what could’ve been one of the twentieths century’s worst economical disasters and not only it helped development but avoided decades of undervelopment. In general, the Proposition side tried to analyze the free trade agreement’s benefits by just taking simple statistics of GDP growth after their signings but just recalling isolated and strange historical cases, while the opposition explained recent and common cases, analyzing the direct effects of the FTA and not only the GDP, which is also affected by the other macroeconomical variables. However, when related, we did also specifically mention the effects on other macroeconomical variables, such as investment and consumption. One we did that, the proposition just tried to run their two already tired arguments of fairness and freedom in circles. The proposition should’ve convinced everyone on the idea that abandoning free trade agreements would be beneficial to poorer countries. However, none of their 8 points addressed that...The, I should say, point and only tried to find negative spots of free trade agreements, while the opposition side did rebut and turned over their arguments of fairness and freedom and addressed how abandoning free trade agreements or not joining them would just be worse than signing them (and in fact we proved that they are even beneficial and secure. This was our case and we proved it. It is on this grounds that we beg you to oppose this motion.