RAW DEAL FOR ANIMALS AND THE ENVIRONMENT:

Statement in Opposition to the Revised Peru Free Trade Agreement

Dear Member of Congress:

We, the undersigned animal welfare, animal rights, vegetarian, public health, environmental, and wildlife conservation organizations are writing to express our unequivocal opposition the Peru Free Trade Agreement and to urge members of Congress to vote against it. Revisions to the agreement made earlier this year fail to address the core animal welfare and wildlife habitat conservation problems inherent in this trade agreement.

Investor Rules Favor Corporate Polluters
The deal fails to address the lack of parity between the agreement's environmental and investment chapters. Corporations can sue in international tribunals for vast sums should environmental protections interfere with their investments, while environmental groups cannot sue corporations for their ecological crimes. Invocation of the Multilateral Environmental Agreements now enfranchised in the trade agreement is left to two administrations that have shown flagrant disregard for environmental treaty and law. . The agreements' investment provisions provide an opportunity for corporations to strong-arm countries into undermining their environmental laws for fear of being penalized for vast sums via an international tribunal challenge. Addressing these concerns in a non-binding preambular statement, the Peru FTA provides little reassurance. Provisions such as those investment protections writ into the Peru FTA have been rejected time and again as in the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement and the failure of the Multilateral Agreement on Investments. Such provisions must be deleted from the Peru Free Trade Agreement as well. Peru's indigenous population and environment have already suffered greatly as a result of pollution and ecological destruction by corporations such as Newmont and Occidental Petroleum. The Peru FTA agreement will give corporations an incentive to further ecologically destructive practices with impunity.

Farmer Displacement Risks Increased Deforestation
The agreement fails to address the threat to forests created by the displacement of Peruvian farmers as a result of agricultural tariff elimination under the FTA. Under NAFTA, according to Oxfam International, nearly one and a half million small farmers lost their land. This led to an upsurge in tree clearing for farming and fuel. Subsequent to NAFTA implementation, the annual rate of deforestation in Mexico rose to 1.1 million hectares, practically doubling the pre-NAFTA rate of 600 thousand hectares per year. The Peruvian Amazon will likely experience similar impacts as a result of the FTA.

New Anti-Illegal Logging Measures are Vague
The agreement's new illegal logging provisions contain many measures that would, in principle, represent a major advance in protecting Peru's rainforests. Yet these provisions are consistently marred by vague, subjective language For example, the timber provisions call on Peru to "Increase the number and effectiveness of personnel devoted to enforcing Peru's laws, regulations, and other measures relating to the harvest of, and trade in, timber products, with a view to substantially reducing illegal logging and associated trade in these products. For example, the timber provisions call on Peru to " Increase the number and effectiveness of personnel devoted to enforcing Peru's laws, regulations, and other measures relating to the harvest of, and trade in, timber products, with a view to substantially reducing illegal logging and associated trade in these products" yet fails to specific what would constitute a significant number of additional personnel or how they will be made more effective. Given Peru's history of poor environmental law enforcement, such vague prescriptions are unlikely to lead to practicable reform. Serious logging reforms will require an enumerated commitment to increased funding, possibly from the US government, specific, measurable benchmarks, and a capacity for intervention by environmental NGOs comparable to the power granted corporations in investor-state provisions.

Legal Timber Exports and Exports of Non-CITES Listed Species Not Addressed While the new agreement takes steps to prohibit illegal timber exports and attempts to set mahogany export quotas, it does nothing to address legal wood exports of species not currently listed under CITES. This approach fails to recognize that CITES listing is a long, slow process, and that many species have been driven to the bring of extinction while awaiting CITES listing. Moreover, CITES addresses the trade in endangered species, but, in contrast to the US Endangered Species Act, fails to consider the impact of extraction on non-traded endangered species. In tropical rainforests, individual trees of non-endangered species may contain a treasure in rare and endangered wildlife species which are killed when trees are felled and milled. Because the loggers do not trade the endangered species killed in the process, but only the trees, CITES provides no protection. Selective hardwood extraction in the Andean region means large-scale destruction of habitat and wildlife. To extract high-value species of tree, logging interests must create vast logging roads. By creating these roads, they facilitate further land incursions, leading to total clearing of forested area area for plantation land. . The emphasis on illegal logging also fails to consider that enforcement of illegal logging prohibitions in Brazil have largely served to increase the volume in legally logged but still ecologically damaging mahogany extraction,. Failure to address these concerns directly in the agreement, redoubled by anti-environmental investor protection rules, will only encourage destructive logging practices.

"Buy Green" Rules Prohibited
The revised Peru FTA ignores concerns that procurement rules of the agreement could inhibit "buy green" or recycled content state purchasing programs. Eight states have agreed to be bound by the Peru agreement's procurement rules. Among these is New York. New York City is the largest municipal user of tropical rainforest wood in North America. New York City agencies use tropical rainforest wood for benches, bridges, boardwalks, piers, docks, and bridge decking. Ipe, a Peruvian export, is used for large-scale construction and restoration projects, including maintenance of the Coney Island boardwalk. Ipe extraction is directly linked to large-scale destruction of endangered rainforest ecosystems and critical wildlife habitat. Efforts at the city level to pass selective purchasing legislation to prohibit the use of uncertified tropical hardwoods have been rebuffed by city government, claiming state preemption, and efforts are currently under way in New York to craft state legislation that would address this issue. Such state legislation could be challenged in a secret International Tribunal because of New York's commitment to the Peru FTA.

No Provisions for Stopping Wildlife Hunting By Logging Personnel
Conservationists have identified the mass-scale hunting of rainforest mammals and birds by logging company personnel as a major threat to rainforest wildlife to the point of local extermination of large mammal populations. Provisions addressing log exports fail to directly address this issue. Again, even if illegal logging is effectively curtailed by the agreement, which is doubtful, a consequent increase in legal logging will likely result in the continuation of similar hunting practices. Efforts to restrict logging company access to wildlife rich lands on this basis are threatened by the Peru agreement's investor protection rules.

Expanded Factory Farms Recognizing the unsanitary and inhumane conditions of factory farms, approximately 50% of Peruvian consumers prefer and consume locally grown, family raised meat products to those created from animals raised on inhumane, unsanitary factory farms, where animals live in squalor and are fed hormones and antibiotics. Yet raising chickens generates less income than the sale of staple grains for the average family farm meat producers in Peru. With the elimination of agricultural tariffs on US grains, Peruvian family farmers will lose their major source of income, to domestic or foreign produced factory farm products. US factory farm interests intend to exploit this situation, in tandem with the elimination of agricultural tariffs on US-produced animal products, to flood the Peruvian market with factory farm produced meat, dairy, and egg products. Factory farmed animals suffer under grossly inhumane conditions. They are deprived of basic freedom of movement and forced to live in squalid conditions under intense concentration in enclosed sheds. Factory "farms" have persisted in contaminating water and air quality throughout the United States, in spite of fierce opposition from community groups, environmentalists, family farmers, and animal welfare advocates. New markets for US factory farm products in Peru, a nation of 26 million potential customers, will expand US factory farm production, exacerbating these problems. . To effectively compete with US producers, Peruvian farmers will be forced to shift to factory farm methods. Peru was the epicenter of a hemisphere wide cholera outbreak in 1991, and with far worse infrastructure for water filtration than the United States, will face a public health crisis from factory farm water contamination.

Lowering of Food Safety Standards
As a precondition of signing the agreement, Peru must eliminate restrictions on US beef imports despite legitimate concerns about the importation of mad cow infected beef. Peru recently banned imports of poultry from the U.S. because of USDA Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) measures, which were considered lacking after incidences of avian influenza and Newcastle Disease. In 2004, avian flu was detected in a flock of 7,000 chickens in Texas as well as in New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware, and the flu was actually transmitted to a human in New York a year before. The United States currently has embargos on countries, mostly Asian, where avian flu is present. The United States maintains embargos against those countries while admonishing Peru's ban against U.S. products as unscientific, regardless of documented cases of bird flu occurring within the U.S. itself. Under the Peru FTA, Peru's market will open, and Peru will accept USDA standards. The spread of avian influenza has been directly linked to the factory farm agriculture methods that now dominate US poultry production Considering that over 70% of protein consumed in Peru comes from poultry, Peru's barrier on unsafe imports represents a legitimate public safety measure.. The transmission of bird flu to Peru could be disastrous and effect public health, agriculture and sustainable rural economy.. Instead of lowing standards, Congress should protect consumers in the US and abroad, and investigate the unsanitary, environmentally destructive, and inhumane methods conditions under which corporate agribusiness is producing poultry and beef.

Unsafe Food Additive Forced on US Consumers
Carmine and cochineal are dyes derived from the dried remains of the cochineal beetle, and they are used as ingredients in foods, beverages, and cosmetics. Peru is the world's largest producer and exporter of these dyes, and the US is the world's largest importer. In 1998, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CPSI) filed an FDA petition advocating more accurate labeling on foods and cosmetics containing these dyes. These dyes are unsuitable for consumers who practice vegetarian, halal, or kosher diets, and have also been linked to severe allergic reactions in a small percentage of workers involves in handling the dye and users of products containing it, including asthma, rhinitis, spasmodic cough, dyspnoea, anaphylactic shock, cracked and bleeding lips sneezing, conjunctivitis, pruritus, urticaria, Quincke's oedema, bronchospasm, chills, nausea, vomiting, angioedema diarrhea, irritation and oedema of the eyelids, severe stomach ache, and rhinoconjunctivitis. Last year, the FDA considered labeling the dye in ingredient lists as "insect based" or banning it outright, yet the Asociacion de Exportadores, an organization representing the Peruvian exporting companies, wrote to the FDA opposing stronger labeling and denying the existence of any health risks related to the product, and U.S. companies using carmine and cochineal reinforced their opposition. The FDA decided that the ingredients ought to be labeled innocuously, as "carmine." Should further efforts be made by public interest groups to ban carmine, any new rules could face a challenge by Asociacion de Exportadores under the FTA as an unfair barrier to trade, undermining the ability of the FDA to protect US consumers from unsafe products. The undermining of protections for US consumers from unsafe products evinces a serious usurpation of democratic authority by the Peru FTA.

Export of Fighting Cocks The inhumane bloodsport of cockfighting is illegal in every state in the U.S.A., and all interstate transportation or export of birds for fighting purposes is prohibited by the federal Animal Welfare Act as a felony. However, the Peru free trade agreement contains provisions for the export of purpose-bred fighting animals and fighting animal breeding stock to Peru, where cockfighting is legal and exempted from animal welfare laws. Cockfighting has also been linked to the spread of Newcastle disease in poultry. US trade agreements should not provide export provisions for animals purpose-bred for uses deemed inhumane in our country.

Despite the "window dressing" of an environmental chapter filled with lofty green platitudes, the Peru Free Trade Agreement, even in its revised form, fails modify the anti-environmental provisions that have already had adverse ecological impacts under NAFTA. We need a new direction, not insignificant tweaks to the same old Bush trade agenda. Every recent poll shows that US citizens are deeply concerned about the negative impacts of trade agreements and institutions like NAFTA and the WTO, and changing our national policy on trade was among the core concerns of the voters in the 2006 election who replaced supporters of NAFTA and DR-CAFTA with pro-fair trade challengers. The animal welfare, animal rights, vegetarian, public health, and wildlife conservation communities stand united in calling on members of Congress should follow the lead of US voters and OPPOSE the Peru Free Trade Agreement.

Signers:

Committee to Abolish Sport Hunting
Compassion Over Killing
Dogs Deserve Better
Eastern Shore Sanctuary and Education Center
League of Humane Voters USA
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
Primal Spirit Foods
Southern California Vegetarians
The Animals Voice
The Trixie Foundation
United Federation of Teachers Humane Education Committee
Veg News Magazine
Voice for Animals
Voice for Animals Humane Society