Four groups hosted a conference this weekend to inform the public about the Free Trade Area of the Americas trade agreement and its possible consequences.
The "NO WAY FTAA! Education and Mobilization Against the FTAA" conference featured a variety of informational workshops as well as a Saturday evening dinner featuring a guest speaker and performances.
"It's very educational because the workshops provide dialogue and discussion," art education junior Laura Mullkoff said. "It's not just listening to a speaker the whole time."
Mullkoff is a member of Students for Economic Justice, a group that helped organize the event with Direct Action, Students for Peace and Justice and The Real Food Group.
"We've also got a lot of support from local unions," Mullkoff said. "It's gone really well. There's a lot of people here from out of town. We probably had about 150 people here."
The FTAA is a trade agreement under negotiation that would expand the North American Free Trade Agreement to every country in Central America, South America and the Caribbean, except Cuba. Negotiations began when NAFTA was launched in 1994 and are expected to be completed in 2005.
Nine working groups were set up to negotiate the FTAA. Each group corresponds to the NAFTA chapters, with topics including agriculture, competition policy, dispute settlement, government procurement, intellectual property rights, investment, market access, services, subsidies and anti-dumping.
"FTAA has a role in our lives," English senior Jason Perez said. "As in what jobs are out there or not out there. It's important for perspective job market candidates to know the ins and outs of what's going on with our economic system."
The interactive workshops covered topics including the group's opinion on various consequences of the FTAA, nonviolent civil disobedience, anarchism, self-defense for demonstrators, poverty and the effects of globalization on women.
"The workshops have been pretty informative overall," Perez said. "There's a lot of information out there that has been largely ignored by the rest of the U.S. that's shared in the workshops - a lot of depth."
The dinner and evening festivities offered entertainment and additional opportunities for visitors to gain information. Representatives from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Mexican Solidarity Network spoke about the restrictions placed on the movement of people when borders are opened because of agreements such as the FTAA.
"The events give a better understanding of how to successfully help the movement against the FTAA," environmental studies and applications senior Shannon Rasch said. "The implications of what can happen is huge to everyone in the world."
But not everyone is against the FTAA.
Political theory and constitutional democracy junior and Michigan Federation of College Republicans president, Jason Miller, said closer ties with Latin America are good for the economy.
"At the whole, people are better off when they're able to specialize and conduct business as they choose, from whoever they choose," said Miller, a State News columnist. "Specialization makes sense for the family and nation as well.
"Of course there are some losses, but the FTAA shouldn't upset our economy any more than NAFTA did."
