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North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
January 1, 2004 marks the tenth anniversary of the North
American Free Trade Agreement’s implementation. NAFTA promoters -
including many of the world’s largest corporations - promised it would
create hundreds of thousands of new high-wage U.S. jobs,
raise living standards in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, improve
environmental conditions and transform Mexico from a poor developing
country into a booming new market for U.S. exports. NAFTA opponents -
including labor, environmental, consumer and religious groups -
argued that NAFTA would launch a race-to-the-bottom in wages, destroy
hundreds of thousands of good U.S. jobs, undermine democratic control
of domestic policy-making and threaten health, environmental and food
safety standards.
Why such divergent views? NAFTA was a radical experiment - never
before had a merger of three nations with such radically different
levels of development been attempted. Plus, until NAFTA “trade”
agreements only dealt with cutting tariffs and lifting quotas to set
the terms of trade in goods between countries. But NAFTA contained 900 pages of one-size-fits-all rules to which each nation was required to conform all of its domestic
laws - regardless of whether voters and their democratically-elected
representatives had previously rejected the very same policies in
Congress, state legislatures or city councils. NAFTA required limits on
the safety and inspection of meat sold in our grocery stores; new
patent rules that raised medicine prices; constraints on your local
government’s ability to zone against sprawl or toxic industries; and
elimination of preferences for spending your tax dollars on U.S.-made
products or locally-grown food. In fact, calling NAFTA a “trade”
agreement is misleading, NAFTA is really an investment agreement.
Its core provisions grant foreign investors a remarkable set of new
rights and privileges that promote relocation abroad of factories and
jobs and the privatization and deregulation of essential services, such
as water, energy and health care.
Remarkably, many of NAFTA’s most passionate boosters in Congress and
among economists never read the agreement. They made their
pie-in-the-sky promises of NAFTA benefits based on trade theory and
ideological prejudice for anything with the term “free trade” attached
to it. Now, ten years later, the time for conjecture and promises is
over: the data are in and they clearly show the damage NAFTA has
wrought for millions of people in the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
Thankfully, the failed NAFTA model - a watered down version of which is
also contained in the World Trade Organization (WTO) -
is merely one among many options. Throughout the world, people
suffering with the consequences of this disastrous experiment are
organizing to demand the better world we know is possible. But, we face
a race against time. The same interests who got us into NAFTA are now
pushing to expand it and lock in 31 more countries in Latin American
and the Caribbean through the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and five Central American countries through a Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).
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