At the end of October, trade ministers from 34 countries of the western hemisphere gathered in Quito, Ecuador, for the latest round of haggling over a proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas. Don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of the FTAA. The negotiations to draft a single set of regulations that would govern trade and investment across two continents have been conducted in secret, with very little input from civil society and very little coverage by the media. Along with several other students at Yale’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, we were lucky to attend some of the events in Quito. The contrast between what was going on inside fancy hotel ballrooms and out in the city’s universities, parks, and streets was striking indeed.

The FTAA would create an overarching framework for the liberalization of trade and investment relations throughout the hemisphere. In this respect, it looks much like the North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, the US, and Mexico, which went into effect in 1994. Despite all of the hoopla connected with NAFTA, an increasing array of statistics show that the US economy has seen very little benefit from it. Meanwhile, small farmers in Mexico have been crushed by an influx of cheap, subsidized food from El Norte.

The prospect of US goods and services overrunning markets and wiping out competitors elsewhere in the hemisphere was frequently cited by people we met as a source of real unease. Evo Morales, a Bolivian farmer who ran for his country’s presidency last year, told reporters that the FTAA would be “economicide” for peasant farmers across the Americas. Equally unsettling to many is the prospect that genetically engineered US crops will be forced into kitchens and shops if the FTAA weakens the ability of individual nations to set their own health, safety, and environmental regulations.

Another major concern for Latin American nations is a possible FTAA version of NAFTA’s controversial Chapter 11. Its provisions have allowed multinational corporations to directly sue national governments when their social or environmental laws are seen as restricting the company’s ‘right’ to profit. For instance, laws banning a toxic gasoline additive were successfully undermined in Canada, with the government forced to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement to US-based Ethyl Corporation.

These and many other concerns were discussed and debated in Quito, as representatives from hundreds of non-governmental organizations and social movements from across the Americas met in workshops and forums organized by the Hemispheric Social Alliance. We heard students, unionists, environmentalists, and community leaders from Panama to Peru reject the FTAA framework as one that mostly promotes corporate and US interests. They spoke of a legacy of colonialism and exploitation that has left more than two-thirds of Latin Americans still struggling in poverty, and they wondered whether an FTAA would only make things worse.

For Luis Macas of the CONAIE, one of the organizations of indigenous people in Ecuador that played a central role in organizing the mobilization in Quito, “the FTAA is an imposition from the north. We are not against integration: the first step can be Andean integration, the second step can be Latin American integration, but not an integration that is directly imposed by a power like the United States.” When more than 10,000 singing, dancing, and drum-beating demonstrators took to the streets of Quito later that week, they echoed this call for a different vision of the Americas that is fairer to the poor and less destructive of the environment.

Meanwhile, behind a cordon of 5,000 police and soldiers, trade ministers were unable to achieve any significant consensus on the FTAA’s various provisions. Venezuela openly refused to commit to the 2005 negotiation deadline, and Ecuador – the host country – expressed reluctance to sign a future agreement. And despite dissatisfaction throughout Latin America, the US refused to cut its $50 billion in agricultural subsidies, promising only that this could become a subject for future discussion. What emerged at the end of the two-day meeting was little more than a weak reaffirmation to the existing FTAA process, and vague language that seeks a ‘constructive’ engagement with civil society.

The Hemispheric Social Alliance refused any such engagement; instead, it is planning to organize a series of referendums across the Americas to determine whether the FTAA has popular support. Results from just such a plebiscite in Brazil showed substantial opposition to the plan. Likewise, polls in the US have revealed that nearly two-thirds of those questioned are opposed to the idea of an FTAA. Yet Robert Zoellick, the US Trade Representative, continues to aggressively push this agenda. Before next year’s round of negotiations in Miami, American officials would do well to reconsider their support for this undemocratic, unequitable, and unsustainable trade agreement.