By Anuradha Mittal (*). Recently
Canadian parliamentarians New Democratic Party and Bloc Quebec met with their U.S. and Mexican counterparts to state that the North American Free Trade Agreement, known by its acronym NAFTA, is a "continental tragedy." "If it was a success would not need the wall that the U.S. wants to build on its border with Mexico and would not need to militarize," said Victor Suarez Mexican legislature.
The debate over the fate of 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States continues, however, ignoring the structural issues that have forced them to leave their homes. Free trade agreements like NAFTA promised to create more jobs, trade surpluses and a better standard of living in the countries signatories of those treaties. But reality says otherwise.
corn grown in Mexico for 10,000 years. Under NAFTA, which was supposed to "level the playing field, Mexico opened its markets to U.S. imports, including among them the corn. Mexican farmers were then unable to compete against the big U.S. producers corn growers in his country the largest recipient of state subsidies, which come at a cost of 10,000 million dollars, something like 10 times more than Mexico's agricultural budget for 2000. This multi-million dollar U.S. grant for the production of U.S. corn dumping allowed in the Mexican market for a total of between 105 and 145 million dollars annually.
not surprising then that U.S. corn exports to Mexico have tripled, and cover nearly a third of the Mexican domestic market, leading to a crisis in the corn sector. The increase in imports has reduced real prices for Mexican corn by more than 70% since 1994. Falling prices mean for Mexican corn growers a drop in income which, in turn, causes the forced abandonment of their lands and migration. In 1997, according to figures from the United Nations Organization for Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 47% of the Mexican population was engaged in agriculture. It is estimated that in 2010, that percentage falls to 18%.
Far from operating in a "level playing field", NAFTA has meant a death certificate for small farmers and peasants Mexican places at the wrong end of a steep and abrupt that field, however, is downhill to the producers of the U.S. Midwest.
Advocates of free trade agreements often include the creation jobs in Mexico as a success of NAFTA. However, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), based in the United States, notes that while low-wage jobs and low productivity (eg unpaid work in family enterprises) has grown rapidly since the early 90, 1998 income of employees fell by 25%, while those of self-employed decreased by 40%. EPI indicates that wages fell by about 27% between 1991 and 1998, while total income per hour worked fell by 40%. In addition, the minimum wage lost about 50% of its purchasing power in the last decade. Wages industry also declined by nearly 21% during that period. So while NAFTA benefited a few sectors of the economy, especially the maquiladora industries and the very wealthy, actually increased inequality and reduced incomes and job quality for the vast majority of Mexican workers.
The failure of NAFTA with the U.S. failure to eliminate their distorting subsidies have forced millions of Mexicans to head to the border. The figure reported in 1995 of 2 million 500 thousand illegal immigrants from Mexico past the U.S. has risen to 8 million since then. Hoping for a better life, the Mexicans are at risk of crossing the border but only end up finding slavery in U.S. fields, being incarcerated at the border, to be the target of U.S. lawmakers of xenophobia and sometimes even find death in the attempt. In 2005 an estimated 400 Mexicans died trying to cross the border.
As no wall will be able to remove the pressure on the US-Mexican border a few simple questions arise: should be criminalized immigrants at our borders walled or we get rid of free trade agreements or renegotiate? Should we blame the victims of free trade agreements or ensure that the same way that capital and goods flow freely across borders can also do the hungry, the homeless and the dispossessed? (END / COPYRIGHT IPS)
(*) Anuradha Mittal, founder and director of the Oakland Institute.
http://www.telesurtv.net/opinion-mittal.php
(*) founder and director of the Oakland Institute
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