Under the new FTAA investment rules, programs that help small women business owners win lucrative contracts with their local, state, and federal governments may violate the national treatment principle and be abolished. This provision would also impede the use of economic sanctions to encourage other governments to reform their human rights records. Under this provision, conditioning investments or purchasing on a country's human rights record would be seen as discriminatory, and thus, illegal. This provision would also hurt women's micro-enterprise ventures. Micro-credit is the provision of small loans to women and men so that they can launch small enterprise ventures.
Some women produce crafts while others grow and sell food at the local market.
Unlike men who spend more of their wages on themselves, female borrowers tend to invest most of their earnings on improving their households and their children s lives. As a result, the entire family gains from women s micro-credit ventures. Under the FTAA, women's micro enterprise ventures and women small business owners would find it hard to compete with cheap imports. Under the FTAA investment rules, it would be discriminatory to protect micro enterprises and small businesses from competition with massive influxes of cheap imports. These small businesses don't have the economies of scale to compete with the low prices large corporations can afford to charge for products.