ALBA

In response, the World Trade Organization now requires that medicines be patented. 

Countries such as India and Egypt, which have acceded to this demand for intellectual property rights, have seen the giant pharmaceutical corporations first eliminate competition and then raise prices out of the reach of ordinary folk. Since the patent system does not recognize the knowledge and resources of local people, the transnationals can appropriate natural products used free or at low cost for centuries and sell them back at exorbitant prices. This also has the important effect of reducing genetic variety of many of the principal food crops by using exclusively genetically manipulated seeds as well as agrochemicals, thus drastically reducing auto-adaptation and regeneration of ecological systems. 

Another area of contention is the essential services that many people (not in the U.S.) consider rights. Such necessary services as health care, education, drinking water, transportation, mail, as well as labor legislation and consumer protection, would pass to private hands under FTAA. Those countries that have privatized such basics have had transnationals enter and transform citizens into consumers, very many of whom can then no longer afford the services at all. 

A lthough Venezuelan President Chavez (and other Latin American leaders) recognize the importance of more trade and support to development in the hemisphere, he is no dummy, and seeing the road to FTAA paved with more poverty, unemployment, and sparse development, he has proposed an alternative that would encourage trade negotiations in sub-regional blocs to support growth, balance asymmetries, and promote economic and social development. 

ALBA is symbolic of the growing cooperation between nations, not limited to the economic. One important example is the strengthening of cooperative ties in different sectors in MERCOSUR (the Southern Common Market) that encompasses Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay—soon to add oil-rich Venezuela, plus Chile and Bolivia, as associate members. 

To balance asymmetries among countries and to construct ALBA, Venezuela proposes Compensatory Funds or Structural Convergence Funds to significantly reduce the lopsidedness between nations and productive sectors. ALBA proposes that the nations in the region jointly identify the criteria to be used to judge disequilibrium and give a clear definition of what is a “smaller economy”—using such measures as population, resources, production, composition of exports, level of industrial development, per capita income, and levels of poverty. 

With those criteria recognized, resources would be directed to intra-national sectors to improve efficiency and transparency. In contrast to the FTAA, ALBA proposes that elimination of poverty and social marginality take precedence, including human, labor, and gender rights, as well as defense of the environment and integration. 

Thus far under ALBA Venezuela has signed contracts with Caribbean countries to supply oil under very favorable conditions of payment and, in some cases (such as Cuba), part of the oil payment has been literacy teachers and medical teams for the Venezuelan poor. Another important ALBA program, co-sponsored with Cuba, is Operation Miracle, permitting thousands of poor people—initially just from Venezuela, but now from Guatemala, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Panama—to come to Cuba for eye surgery for cataracts and other severe ocular diseases. The program now has surgical centers in Bolivia and Venezuela as well. 

These certainly don’t sound like programs and treaties that have come before. This is because ALBA embodies a new kind of unity based on positive values.