While acquiring almost total control of the market, it has also fired several hundred employees. We also refuse a greater level of liberalization in the agricultural sector. In Chile, the change to growing crops for exports as well as planting fast-growing trees has been to the benefit of large multinational companies. It has harmed the traditional agriculture and threatens the country's food security. The import tax reform, agreed to by Chile in the Uruguay round, threatens sugar and wheat production, as well as keeping the state support for the milk industry.
Chile needs a treaty fit for the two sides of the modernization of agriculture.
The high level of use of pesticides and herbicides and the introduction of transgenetic crops need adequate regulation, which respects the life and health of season workers, especially women, and the consumers. The Asiatic crisis and the deregulated opening of our market has produced a level of unemployment which in Chile almost reaches 15 percent of the active population, which is more than a doubling of the 1998 figure. That the dumping exercised by the richer countries of products with added value ends, especially with regards to agricultural products and textiles. That a working group of the civil society of the members countries will be created, annexed to the official meeting, whose work will be to monitor the impact of the negotiations and agreements, and to advance towards a real integration of the peoples. That there will be established regulative norms for the transferring of money and capital, and that some kind of tax in favor of the poorer countries will be introduced, such as proposed for several years by the American economist James Tobin.