Background: There is a massive proliferation of bilateral trade agreements, also known as free trade agreements (FTAs) in the South Asia region. Almost every country in South Asia, which includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, has embarked on negotiating a large number of FTAs with countries within the region or outside, including with developed countries like the European Union, China, United States, Japan and many others. These agreements are about opening up the economies of these countries for trade. This entails removing or eliminating import tariffs, harmonising standards and regulations on food, health and environment and strengthening intellectual property rights etc. This region has already witnessed the damaging impact of 27 years of trade liberalisation under the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Despite these damaging impacts of free trade agreements, Bangladesh for example is presently negotiating more than 25 FTAs and also intends to join a 15 nation mega FTA, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which has a much deeper liberalisation agenda compared to the WTO. Today’s FTAs are quite comprehensive trade agreements and include a wide range of sectors and issues including trade in goods, services, intellectual property (IP), E-commerce, investments, competition policy, value chains, innovation, gender and equality, public procurement, trade facilitation etc. Depending on the bargaining power of the countries involved, FTAs can go much further in liberalizing trade in these sectors, compared to multilateral agreements like the WTO. FTAs are another way to ensure that governments implement the liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation measures of the corporate globalisation agenda. FTAs not only liberalise trade by removing import tariffs but also harmonise regulations on issues like GMOs and biosafety, food standards, health and environment standards, working conditions, investor rights protection etc. Some of the South Asia countries are also not hesitant to accept some of the draconian features of bilateral trade agreements like the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) which protects the rights of the investors from any change in the investment regulations. Under ISDS, any investor can sue the government if the laws and regulations prevent the investor from maximising profit. There are innumerable cases from around the world which indicate that investors (mainly corporations from developed countries) have challenged judicial decisions, legislative measures and public policies in the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) and have received huge compensations, for example, in the ISDS cases like the Vodafone vs India, Philip Morris vs Uruguay (tobacco), Bechtel vs Bolivia (delivery of water by public service). Developing countries are also being forced to accept the TRIPS-plus intellectual property (IP) rights in the form of accession to the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) 1991 to protect the interests of agribusiness corporations engaged in crop research & development. The UPOV ’91 forces countries to implement plant variety protection, which favours seed companies at the expense of farmers. And more importantly for almost every country in South Asia, thousands of farmers are still engaged in saving traditional seeds, the UPOV ‘91 doesn’t allow farmers to save seeds and instead of protecting the rights of farmers, it upholds plant breeders’ rights of seed companies. Under UPOV-91, our farmers will lose their right to save, use, sow, resow, share, exchange or sell their farm produce including seeds of a protected variety. Experiences from other regions in the Global South indicate that countries which have accepted UPOV ’91 under the FTAs with developed countries were forced to compromise farmers’ rights to seeds and had to give away all the provisions of farmers’ rights to seeds from their national legislation. These FTAs are a big concern for the civil society groups and social movements in this region. The major concerns about the FTAs are the undemocratic, non-transparent and non-participatory nature of the negotiation, and the environmental and social consequences of subordinating democracy to the needs of transnational capital. There is no discussion or consultation and no text of the proposed trade deals is made available to the public or to the sectoral groups who would possibly be impacted, like the farmers, women, labour, and hawkers, and neither were they consulted to assess the impact. Another important concern is that the government involved in the FTA negotiations do not bother to publish any paper on the pros and cons of these FTAs nor do they conduct any impact assessment study on how these deals would benefit various sectors or contribute towards employment and development. The consultations are, most often, limited to the business communities or their federations. The World Social Forum is an important platform to discuss this issue with the larger group, especially from South Asian countries, and share our thoughts and strategies to resist these FTAs in South Asia. In this workshop, we plan to bring together groups and movements from South Asian countries to get updates on the bilateral trade deals and plan joint campaigns to educate the common people as well as peoples’ representatives in national and state legislatures about the pros and cons of the bilateral trade deals. We invite participants at the World Social Forum in Nepal, who are interested in sharing their experiences in countering FTAs in their region and contributing towards planning campaigns and mobilisation to resist FTAs in South Asia. A Tentative Agenda: 1. Facilitator to introduce the issue  Explaining the format of the Workshop Introduction of the participants   2. Overview of the FTAs in South Asia                             Get the initial reaction from the participants 3. Presentation from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka (5 mins each) 4. Strategy and follow-up plans.

Statement from Workshop, Resisting Free Trade in South Asia:

We, the undersigned organizations from Peasants and Peasants organisations, Peoples organisations and Social movements in South Asia REJECT FTAs;

We urge governments in this region not to proceed with any FTA negotiations;

If South Asian countries have to go for FTAs, they MUST keep agriculture and fisheries out of any FTAs and NEVER accept UPOV ’91;

We agree on contributing to form "South Asia Trade Justice Campaign" to oppose FTAs in this region.

(first) SIGNATORIES:

Local Futures:  https://www.wsf2024nepal.org/organization-registered-in-wsf/1435

GRAIN : https://www.wsf2024nepal.org/organization-registered-in-wsf/2301

All Nepal Peasants Federation (ANPF)

Wave Foundation, Bangladesh