Free Trade Agreements

This booklet on India's engagement with Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) comes at an opportune moment. Across the world, both in the north and south, neoliberalism, the ideology that underpins free trade is in a deep crisis of legitimacy. Neoliberal policies that promote privatisation, deregulation and free trade have created financial crises, pushed job losses, the creation of precarious low paid employment, devastated peasantry and the environment. Added to this, there is also the mounting evidence that free trade benefits the elite 1% at the cost of workers, a fact that was cynically used by right wing politicians such as Donald Trump to challenge FTAs such as the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).