CAFTA & Women

D espite union opposition in several countries, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) squeaked through the House of Representatives by only two votes on July 28, after passing the Senate a month earlier. CAFTA expands NAFTA-style trade to El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica—with the possible later addition of the Dominican Republic.  

CAFTA’s potential impact on women workers especially is cause for grave concern, as women make up 45 percent of the global workforce, but are 70 percent of the world’s poor. Under NAFTA, wages declined significantly for all Mexican workers, but women made much less than men to begin with, so poverty has increased 50 percent for women-headed households in Mexico.  

Experts are predicting a bigger impact in Central America, since countries there are less industrialized and financially stable than Mexico, being predominately agricultural economies.  

Women farmers are often invisible in official statistics since the importance of subsistence agriculture to food security and local economies is underestimated. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization now recognizes that women are responsible for the production of 60 to 80 percent of the food in the developing world. Women are 51 percent of the agricultural labor force globally and 63 percent in developing countries. Women farmers in Central America will be further alienated and strapped to compete against U.S. market dumping, as they have less land and fewer resources in the first place. 

CAFTA will eliminate tariffs on 80 percent of U.S. goods and 50 percent of U.S. agricultural products, flooding Central American markets with heavily subsidized U.S. produce. “For rural farmers CAFTA means devastation” says Krista Hansen of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. 

Additionally, as Central American men migrate to the cities to find work, more and more women will farm full time while maintaining their role as the main caretakers for their children and households. Having less time to balance all these responsibilities on top of trying to compete with U.S. price subsidies often results in major income loss or women losing their farms altogether. 

Rural poverty increased from 54 percent to 68 percent in Mexico after NAFTA was implemented. More than 80 percent of Mexico’s extreme poor are rural. After NAFTA, 300,000 women farmers in Mexico lost their farms and their jobs. Of the women farmers left, only three percent have more than ten hectares of land. Women’s farms are usually much smaller than men’s and when land is titled, it is usually put in a man’s name. This has had a severe impact on women farmers because Mexico has changed its land laws under NAFTA in favor of individual property rights, hurting women who used to have communal rights to farm land. Women workers in industrial jobs aren’t much better off, particularly in the free trade zones where they are stuck with monotonous, low-paying work. In the maquiladoras—factories in free trade zones—sex discrimination is especially prevalent: forced pregnancy tests to get hired, physical and verbal abuse, sexual harass ment, and age discrimination. 

O ne of the International Labor Organization’s five labor rights is the right to be free from sex discrimination in the workplace, but according to Marianne Mollman of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, “All trade agreements negotiated by the Bush administration have ignored the internationally recognized right to nondiscrimination in the workplace, and none has included adequate labor rights protections.”