Building a new fair trade agenda 14 years after NAFTA

November 5, 2007

Oscar Chacón of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities leads a strategy session to plan responses to NAFTA's broken promises. Photo: K. McNeely/CWS

Mexican farmers face competition from the heavily mechanized and subsidized U.S. corn industry January 1 next year as the final provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) go into effect lifting Mexican tariffs on corn and beans.

In anticipation of this blow to the Mexican economy, Church World Service joined the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and over 50 organizations from the United States, Canada and Mexico in a three-day consultation and strategy session to review NAFTA’s broken promises and current impacts and to build a coalition for a fairer trade agenda.

There has never been a better moment to look at NAFTA and its impacts. This year U.S. citizens have heard divisive debates both on immigration and on food and farm policy through the farm bill. NAFTA’s negative impacts served to fuel both these discussions.

With NAFTA the incomes of the wealthiest Canadians, Mexicans and U.S. Citizens increased by 20 percent while more and more people in all three countries slipped into poverty.

More Canadians now live in poverty – earning lower wages and choosing from fewer job opportunities. On the whole, thanks to NAFTA, Canada has become more dependent on exporting its raw resources to the U.S.

NAFTA promised jobs for Mexicans as a result of greater U.S. and Canadian investments in Mexican businesses and manufacturing. While there were some incentives for U.S. and Canadian businesses to establish industry in Mexico, the better-paying jobs once promised did not stay in Mexico as manufacturers were enticed to go to other countries to find workers who would accept even lower wages.

Subsidized tortilla production was ruled illegal, forcing Mexican corn growers out of business and raising the price of Mexicans’ staple food. The displacement of people due to NAFTA has created a mobile workforce, on which the U.S. agriculture industry now depends.

In the U.S., the African American community was hit hardest. The relocation of factory workers in many cities also cut public sector budgets when factories closed and towns shrunk.

Participants at the NAFTA conference discussed how human rights have almost completely disappeared not only from the NAFTA debate but also from discussions on development. Even the Millennium Development Goals for the most part look at ways to mobilize resources and implement economic policy and planning which ensures that countries reach the goals rather than promoting the basic human rights enshrined in the eight goals.

Participants at the NAFTA conference felt it is high time to change the debate and to ensure that human rights are again an essential part of any discussion around trade and immigration. On their last day together participants engaged in a strategy session naming key moments where unified messages from the three countries would increase the impact sought in each individual country.