The Obama Administration has bargained for a free trade agreement (FTA) with South Korea that mimics the same language of NAFTA style free trade negotiated and passed by the Bush administration. The Peru Free Trade Agreement has already gone into effect, damning indigenous lands to corporate plunder, and the Colombia and Panama Free Trade Agreements are awaiting decision before Congress. The South Korea FTA mimics the same strategies of laissez-faire economics that protect big business at the cost of ecologically sustainable domestic markets. Although South Korea has been almost entirely deforested by its US-sponsored government, millions of people took to the streets last year in the biggest protests in that country’s history to defend food sovereignty against free trade agreements with the US. Free trade agreements support deregulated factory farms and multinational monocrop plantations that utilize pesticides and fertilizers that destroy the world. click here for a statement by Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach.
