Wasn’t NAFTA supposed to make us all rich?

4 January 2008

Mexico may lose as many as 350,000 farm jobs this year because of competition from U.S. corn and sugar producers under the North American Free Trade Agreement, the head of Mexico’s largest farm workers’ group said.

Mexico will have surpluses of sugar, beans and corn in 2008, Cruz Lopez Aguilar, head of the National Confederation of Farm Workers, said yesterday in an interview in Mexico City.

Lopez Aguilar and 6,000 delegates from his organization will ask Mexico’s agriculture minister tomorrow to renegotiate Nafta, which opened Mexico to U.S. imports of corn, sugar, milk and beans on Jan. 1. The government should guarantee purchases of surpluses from Mexican farmers before buying from Canada or the U.S., he said.

“Mexico’s agricultural products must end up on Mexican tables,” Lopez Aguilar said. “If we don’t resolve the problem, we could lose as many as 350,000 jobs.”

Mexico’s Speaker of the House, Ruth Zavaleta, said in a statement that she would ask President Felipe Calderon to renegotiate the terms of Nafta. The opposition deputy said Nafta would force many farmers and their families to cross into the U.S. illegally for better jobs.

“We don’t see an alternative in our country for them to have immediate employment,” Zavaleta said.

Lopez Aguilar also said the loss of business may spur more Mexicans to enter the U.S. illegally….

Mexico loses 200,000 farm jobs a year, Lopez Aguilar said.

What’s particularly galling about all this has been that there were so many presidential candidates running around a major corn-producing state in the U.S. (Iowa) last week — and none of them noticed NAFTA was kicking in. Marcela Sanchez, in the Washington Post, writes:

On one hand, the idea that free trade has cost U.S. jobs is nearly a given in the campaign. Democrats … decry more than a million jobs lost due to the North American Free Trade Agreement….Even some Republican candidates can’t resist linking current economic anxiety to expanded trade.

On the other hand, immigration — particularly from the south — is blamed for just about everything bad happening in this country. Republican contender Mike Huckabee tried to connect the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan with concerns over security at the southern border. Most Democratic candidates dare not oppose building a bigger wall to separate the United States and Mexico.

The tone has turned so anti-Mexico that Mexican President Felipe Calderon called last month on his diplomatic representatives in the United States to “neutralize this strategy of confrontation.” When he arrives for his first presidential visit to the U.S. later this winter, Calderon is expected to combat the “worst mistake” he believes Mexico or the United States can make — that is, to have citizens in either country “feel that the other nation’s people are the enemy.”

While the presidential candidates’ rhetoric might be excused as the excess of political posturing, it is an indication of how little comfort U.S. voters find in closer relations with their southern neighbor. Or as Armand Peschard-Sverdrup, U.S.-Mexico relations expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, put it, the candidates’ rhetoric reveals “more than anything how much work there is still to be done to deepen people’s knowledge on the issues.”

The U.S. elections aren’t until next November, and — having lived in Iowa for a couple of years — I know the Iowa caucus is a neat trick foisted on the city slickers every four years to get the media and the politicos to spend a lot of money in the state for no real purpose, but geeze, you’d think those people might have a clue about trade policy and agriculture in an agricultural state. Any of the contestants (except maybe the neo-Peronist, Ron Paul; crypto-fascist Rudolf Guilliani , TV evangelist Mike Huckabee — well, lets say any of the “D’s”) would be better than what we have now (so would a Labrador Retriever), but none of them seem worth voting for at this point.