Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) hurt food sovereignty because they:
– Erase the possibility of public strategies supporting local markets.
– Lower or remove tariffs on imported goods, hurting local small-scale food producers who cannot compete with large subsidised agribusiness imports.
– Harmonise standards on food safety, pesticides, GMOs and animal welfare benefitting corporations: the imposed lowest standards protect their profit
margins.
– Rewrite patent laws, requiring countries to privatise plants and animals; criminalise peasants who save and exchange seeds and breeds thus damaging biodiverse food systems.
– Require that foreign investors be treated better than domestic ones, gaining more access to land and water, and powerful rights to defend themselves
through investor-state arbitration that is fundamentally anti-democratic
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