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).
