From: dale@dale.CAM.ORG (Dale Wharton)
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: NAFTA analysis--intro
Date: 18 Dec 92 01:45:17 GMT
Organization: private


         US Citizens' Analysis of NAFTA--introduction
Date:    15 Dec 92 14:29 PST
Source:  Kai Mander <kmander@igc.apc.org>
         Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

This document contains a table of contents and preface to the online
version of the U.S. Citizens' Analysis of the North American Free
Trade Agreement.  The next 15 postings will contain analyses of the
various chapters of NAFTA.  I suggest you look at the titles of each
posting to determine the chapters in which you are interested.  If
you are receiving this message by an electronic mailing list and you
are not interested in a sector-by-sector analysis of NAFTA, I suggest
you delete the appropriate messages immediately, as it will take you
a long time to download them.  For further information, addresses
and phone numbers are included at the bottom of this entry.


TABLE OF CONTENTS (page numbers correspond to printed version)

        Preface
        Executive Summary                        1
        Environment                              7
        Energy                                  15
        Agriculture                             19
        Labor                                   26
        Investment and Corporate Rights         34
        Automotive Sector                       38
        Rules of Origin                         41
        Dispute Resolution                      46
        Preemption of State Law                 51
        Intellectual Property                   54
        Financial Services                      69
        Enterprise for the Americas Initiative  75
        Resource People                         79

PREFACE
        This month, the Presidents of the United States and Mexico and
the Prime Minister of Canada will sign the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), an accord designed to liberalize trade
and deregulate investment among the three countries.  President-
elect Clinton may submit the implementing legislation to Congress
within the next few months.  If approved by the legislatures of the
three nations and implemented in its current form, the NAFTA will
have far-reaching consequences for many sectors, including the areas
of labor and the environment.
        Despite the importance of the NAFTA to citizens' groups across
the country there is, as yet, very little public knowledge and
understanding of its actual content.  The NAFTA negotiations were
very secretive, with little information provided to the U.S. Congress
and even less to the general public.  The completed agreement is
over 2,000 pages long and is filled with ambiguous "legalese."
        This citizens' analysis of the NAFTA is intended to contribute
to an informed public debate on the agreement.  It is a work in
progress, with contributions from a variety of authors.  Citizens'
groups across the United States worked in 13 issues-teams to complete
this analysis.  Similar teams were established in Canada and Mexico.
Representatives from the three national teams plan to meet soon to
formulate an integrated trinational analysis of the NAFTA.  Readers
are encouraged to contact the contributors listed at the end of this
document for further information on particular sectors.
        Many of the contributors to this document are members of one
or more of the U.S. citizens' coalitions on the free-trade agreement
--the Alliance for Responsible Trade (ART, formerly MODTLE), Citizen
Trade Campaign, and the Fair Trade Campaign.  The content of the
analysis, however, is the responsibility of the contributors and the
team coordinators.
        While the contributors and the coalitions may have somewhat
different interpretations of specific aspects of the NAFTA, we are
united in our conviction that this agreement must either be rejected
or fundamentally recast.  We call for a more democratic process
through which the people of the United States, Canada, and Mexico
can engage their governments in the search for equitable and
sustainable solutions to the profound problems related to the
economic integration that is currently underway.  These include
declines in wages and employment levels, a diminishing of labor
rights and standards, environmental degradation, dislocations in
rural communities, massive migration, and human rights violations.

U.S. CITIZENS' ANALYSIS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT
Analysis Team Coordinators:

John Audley       Sierra Club
Steve Beckman     UAW
Beth Burrows      Fair Trade Campaign
John Cavanagh     Institute for Policy Studies
Lance Compa       National Lawyers Guild Free Trade Task Force
Cam Duncan        Greenpeace USA
Karen Hansen-Kuhn  The Development Group for Alternative Policies
Pharis Harvey     International Labor Rights Education & Research Fund
Thea Lee          Economic Policy Institute
Karen Lehman      Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Nikos Valence     Fair Trade Campaign
Lori Wallach      Public Citizen

December 1992
For more copies contact:

The Development GAP, 1400 I Street NW, Suite 520, Washington, DC 20005
Tel: (202)898-1566, Fax: (202)898-1612, E-mail: DGAP@igc.apc.org    or

The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, 1313 5th Street SE,
Suite 303, Minneapolis, MN 55414
Tel: (612)379-5980, Fax: (612)379-5982, E-mail: IATP@igc.apc.org

This document will also be posted in ECONET on the TRADE.LIBRARY
Conference.

Copying of this document is permitted with appropriate attribution.
Newsgroups: can.politics,soc.culture.british,soc.culture.australian.