Free Trade: Deafness and Triumphalism

Meeting yesterday, on the eve of the Global Forum on Agro Food Expectations, the Secretaries of Agriculture from Mexico, the United States and Canada, Enrique Martínez, Thomas James Vilsack and Gerry Ritz, respectively, issued a statement in which they declared the will of their three governments to continue showing the world how trade and open borders favor economic growth and employment, as well as the purpose of constructing a stronger agricultural economy in North America. Among the topics addressed by the officials were climate change, genetically modified products and methods of promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The statement does not seem to be the most apt for Mexico in the current moment — a time when the federal government and domes of private initiative are immersed in increasingly bitter arguments about whether the national economy is growing, ensured by the former, or whether it is at present in a technical state of recession, as the latter [parties] state. [It is a time] when an offensive by U.S. producers is being waged against Mexican sugar, with growing sectors of society mobilizing against a possible invasion of genetically modified products originating from north of the border. Last February, 15 organizations from NAFTA’s three partners pointed out that two decades of free trade have been devastating for agriculture: almost 5 million lost jobs, 6 million people forced to emigrate, a fall in the agricultural gross domestic product to 1.5 percent from 5 percent, and Mexico’s conversion to the world’s third-largest importer of food. Such figures are contained in the [this journal’s] document entitled, “Myths of NAFTA after 20 Years.”

Furthermore, in a letter sent to the presidents of Mexico and the United States and to the Canadian prime minister, the signing organizations pointed out that free trade has been negative for the majority of the three nations’ inhabitants. It has caused human rights to be neglected, was imposed without completing a deep analysis of the social, cultural and environmental impacts, and favored the interests of a handful of corporations above those of the population.

This type of finger-pointing and posturing is, of course, not novel. Prior to the fateful year of 1994 when NAFTA came into effect, various nongovernmental organizations, academics, intellectuals and political sectors have been sounding the alarm about the disastrous social, economic and political implications that would befall our country with the poorly negotiated, asymmetrical, unjust and potentially devastating framework of free trade at its root. On the first of that year, the indigenous Zapatistas of Chiapas rose up in arms in order to express their exasperation facing the circumstances of marginalization, oppression and misery to which they had been relegated, but also in order to manifest their rejection of the international instrument, signed the previous year, which took effect on Jan. 1.

The triumphalism of the three countries’ heads of agriculture ignores NAFTA’s disastrous toll and denies even the least critical questioning of that agreement and its application. It appears that these civil servants only have eyes for the benefits obtained by corporations and not the destruction provoked over the last 20 years by the indiscriminate, hasty and unjust opening of the markets. In conclusion, Martínez, Vilsack and Ritz have made an example of deafness, insensitivity and self-satisfaction. With these attitudes, it is difficult to imagine that the trade agreement between the three nations can be redirected toward a path of social development and economic prosperity for all.