Groups Oppose ‘Fast Track’ to Negotiate Pacts

More than 40 consumer and environmental groups joined the mounting opposition to the Bush Administration’s drive to expand free trade Wednesday, saying that procedures to expedite agreements could weaken U.S. environmental, health and safety laws.

The Administration has said its ability to negotiate two major trade agreements hinges on Congress agreeing to a procedure called “fast track” that prohibits any amendments. In essence, Congress must agree that when it is presented with the agreements, it will either take them or leave them and not try to change them.

One set of negotiations aims to create a single free-trade zone with Mexico and Canada. The other is a round of global trade talks, now in its seventh year, that involves more than 100 nations and seeks to lower trade barriers under the accord known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Administration officials argue that other nations will be reluctant to enter either agreement if they know that Congress could tear them apart. “I regard ‘fast track’ as absolutely indispensable to this government’s capacity to negotiate,” U.S. Trade Representative Carla Anderson Hills has said.

However, consumer advocate Ralph Nader characterized it as “an obscure legislative procedure that allows Congress to go on autopilot while the Administration negotiates sweeping trade agreements that can gut vast stretches of U.S. environmental, health and safety laws.”

Under the trade agreements, such laws might be viewed as barriers to free trade, he argued. “In fact, many of the laws that are most vulnerable” to attack as barriers “are the same ones that the Reagan-Bush Administrations have been trying to scrap for years in Congress--without success.” He noted, for example, that the Canadian government is urging the United States to accept asbestos imports, despite U.S. laws banning the cancer-causing material.

The Administration contends that lower trade barriers offer one of this nation’s best hopes for expanding economic growth over the next decades.

However, the agreements probably will be opposed by a broad spectrum of groups. Organized labor, for example, contends that the agreement with Mexico will encourage businesses to move there to escape union wage scales. Environmentalists fear a similar flight by businesses that consider antipollution laws too burdensome.

Hills has said she hopes that opponents will fight the agreement on its merits rather than taking the “short-sighted” approach of trying to strangle the negotiations by defeating the fast-track procedure.

The trade representative has been meeting with opponents to reassure them that the ultimate agreement will reflect their concerns, a spokesman said.