Unexpected Trade Activists: Giddings-Lovejoy Takes on the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Mark Strothmann, Joining Hands in Presbytery of Giddings-Lovejoy
This boy is selling snacks along the banks of the Rio Mantero in La Oroya. 98% of the children there have lead poisoning from the smelter operations seen in the background. Photo Credit: Mark Strothmann
In the Presbytery of Giddings-Lovejoy, our Joining Hands journey toward becoming trade activists began 15 years ago – an anniversary we’re celebrating this summer.
Beginning in 1998, we began a slow discernment process, searching out a global partner. When we began working with Peruvians through Joining Hands, one of our major focal points was public health problems in the Andean town of La Oroya, where most of the children have severe lead poisoning as a result of contamination spewed by the hemisphere’s largest multi-metal smelter.
Unexpectedly, we became international environmental activists working with newfound friends in Peru.
Fast forward fifteen years, and we have become trade activists, a direction we could never have predicted.
As bad as the consequences of lead poisoning are for people in La Oroya, there is also threat from unscrupulous trade agreements, both past and present. Under the already existing Peru-US Trade Agreement, the Renco Group, owner of the lead smelting operation in La Oroya, is suing the Peruvian government for $800 million.
Their claim? Unfair treatment. And, loss of profits and future profits because the Peruvian government insists that the company fulfill environmental agreements it signed with the purchase of the plant. It sounded outrageous to us. Searching for answers, some of us went to Washington, D.C. to talk to the experts, not in government, but professors at Georgetown University Law School and researchers at the Institute for Policy Studies who led us in tutorials that opened up the world of free trade agreements and their potential detrimental effect on the environment, labor and human rights when corporations and governments behave badly.
Even more, we came to understand the risks for open and transparent processes of our own government when negotiations for trade agreements are completed in secret and the texts are not made available to the public. We were on our way becoming international trade activists.
Back in St. Louis, we got busy finding others who share our concerns about secrecy in the trade negotiation processes, and, possibly, even actions that hamper Congress’ ability to amend. This is key now in the protest surrounding the newest – and largest ever – free trade agreement now under negotiation, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, involving 12 countries that span the Pacific Rim.
We accepted an invitation to help form a group call the St. Louis Roundtable on Extractive Industries. Many of the most serious trade agreement abuses take place in the mining, gas, and coal industries. Environmentalists, human rights activists, and unions are all concerned about the negative impacts of the TPP, so we have joined together in the St. Louis area to raise our voices collectively.
So far this year, we have held two “teach-ins” and a conference call with an aide to Senator Claire McCaskill. We have sent emails to our representatives and letters to the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
We have made many new friends here and abroad who are helping us speak out, all because we reached out fifteen years ago to seek new friends in Peru.
