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Free trade can be transformed into responsible trade, protecting our rich natural heritage and our children's future.
What We Do:
The Sierra Club's Responsible Trade Program (RTP) has shed a light on the environmental threats posed by our current global trading system for close to two decades. We believe that trade done right can foster development and sustainable growth, while also protecting workers and the environment in the United States and abroad. We work to ensure that U.S. trade policy supports, rather than undermines, environmental protection and workers' rights.
Features:
CAFTA Mining Cases in El Salvador
Around the world, public interest laws protecting communities and the environment continue to come under attack by corporations using our free trade agreements. The people of El Salvador stood up against mining practices that were destroying the environment and jeopardizing public health. Now two multinational mining corporations have retaliated by filing lawsuits under CAFTA against the government of El Salvador. Check out our new factsheet on the CAFTA mining cases and the threat to environmental governance everywhere.
Program Overview
Trade agreements are not just about cutting tariffs and quotas anymore. Instead, they affect ever-increasing areas of our lives, and have far-reaching implications for our environment.
Global warming is in large part the result of the current international trade and globalization model and the unsustainable patterns of production, consumption, and development it encourages. Bad trade rules have allowed companies to move operations to wherever labor and environmental standards are the weakest, abandoning communities and workers in the U.S. and wreaking havoc on those abroad.
We must rebalance our trade and globalization policies to create and retain good jobs here at home, protect our air, water, and land, and foster sustainable and equitable development worldwide. To realize the potential of creating millions of jobs in the clean energy economy, we must end trade policies that encourage exporting jobs to countries that pay workers less than a living wage and exploit child and slave labor in violation of the International Labor Organization's core labor standards.
Trade agreements should promote a higher quality of life for all, not simply serve as vehicles to increase corporate profits. Trade rules should be seen as a tool to achieve multiple goals, from economic prosperity to environmental protection. We must learn our lessons from the failed trade agreements of the past and stake out a different course for the future, where peoples' lives and livelihoods are protected.
The current trade model contributes to climate change? You bet!
Instead of helping the nations of the world curb global warming, our current trade rules have institutionalized unsustainable production and consumption patterns world-wide. These rules have allowed companies to move operations to wherever labor and environmental standards are the weakest, abandoning communities and workers in the U.S. and wreaking havoc on those abroad.
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