Tues, 4/10: Confront Rep. Crowley on Anti-Animal/Anti-Environment Trade Votes @ Queens Town Hall Meeting

*Confront Queens Rep. Crowley on his votes for Anti-Animal Trade
Agreements!*

*Join Global Justice for Animals and the Environment and other groups fighting unjust trade agreements to protest Crowley's as he speaks at a town hall meeting in Jackson Heights, Queens!*

*When: *Tuesday, April 10th, 2012, 5:30PM-8PM

*Where: *Jackson Heights Jewish Center, 3706 77th Street between 37th Avenue and Roosevelt Avenue, Jackson Heights, Queens, NY

*Directions: *7 train to 74th-Broadway or E, F, M, or R to Jackson Heights-Roosevelt Avenue

Email: info@ gjae.org

More info: http://gjae.org/

On October 12, Representative Joseph Crowley voted for free trade agreements with South Korea , Colombia,and Panama with disastrous implications for animals.

*Ocean Life Endangered*

These agreements also put ocean life at risk.

South Korea announced in March 2011 that it will allow 200 wild dolphins to be captured in the Sea of Japan and is also importing dolphins from the notorious Taji dolphin hunt in Japan exposed in the film "The Cove." Whereas the US supports CITES listing for threatened bluefin tuna, South
Korea's bluefin catch and exports to Japan are surging. Flouting the international whaling moratorium, South Korea allows fishermen who "accidentally" catch whales to sell them at state-designated facilities. South Korea's environmental organizations are calling on international pressure to influence their government to implement legislation to curb these practices. By signing the Korea FTA without first demanding Korea address these issues, the US squandered critical leverage to encourage the Korean government to match a broad international consensus against these practices.

The Panama Free Trade Agreement permits the tariff-free export of dolphins from Panama to marine mammal parks, where dolphins life short, miserable lives. The agreement also empowers dolphin capture operations to challenge any effort to restrict the capture and export live dolphins and whales.

*Meat Industry Gains*

These agreements will dramatically increase factory farming and meat consumption. The Korea-US Free Trade Agreement will allow subsidized US industrial farm exports to flood the South Korean market tariff-free at prices lower than Korea's domestically produced animal products and imports from other nations. According to the Center for Agriculture and
Rural Development, this will result in increased consumption of pork by 9%, chicken by 6.1 %, cheese by 13.1, and butter by 14.1%. This will doom tens of millions of additional animals every year to hellish lives on factory farms and painful and terrifying slaughterhouse deaths as a direct result. According to Patrick Boyle, president and CEO of the
American Meat Institute, "The U.S. Korean Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), if ratified, would be the biggest shot in the arm to the meat and poultry industry since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994." To stay competitive with foreign exports, South Korea has increasingly shifted away from traditional family farm
agriculture towards corporate agribusiness using high concentration, intensive confinement factory farms. This shift to factory farming has resulted in outbreaks of dangerous livestock diseases like swine flu and and hoof and mouth disease and annual mass culls of farmed animals.
Between December 2010 and March 2011, close to 10 million animals - pigs, chickens, cattle,goats, and deer - were culled, with 8 million buried alive.

The increased pressure placed on Korea's domestic agriculture from tariff-free free US imports will wipe wour Korea's family farms and guarantee that the trend towards factory farming in South Korea will continue, making more culls inevitable. Similarly, the Panama Free Trade Agreement will allow factory farms to wipe out Panama's domestic, family
farm agriculture as US factory farm exports are allowed to dominate the Panamanian market.

*Rainforest Wildlife at Risk*

As with the Korea Agreement, the Colombia Free Trade Agreement will eliminate tarif