The Mexican Experience w/NAFTA(US Farm Supports drive Mexicans off the farm--& they head north)

The Mexican Experience and Lessons for WTO Negotiations on the Agreement on Agriculture

The following is the text of a speech delivered by the author as part of the "Hearing of Experts on WTO: Agriculture, TRIPS and Singapore Issues" before the Committee on Industry, External Trade, Research, and Energy of the European Parliament, June 11, 2003.

The Doha Round mandated that special attention be given to the development needs of developing countries. Therefore, a review of the Agreement on Agriculture must focus on the impact of liberalization to date and the potential impact of new rules.

Mexico has been called the laboratory of free trade, because the nation radically opened its borders beginning in 1986, with entry into GATT. Mexico carried out unilateral trade liberalization and structural adjustments that accelerated in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. We can now draw on nearly two decades of experience in agricultural free trade policies from the perspective of a developing country. The lessons are illuminating for the present WTO negotiations, and indicate the need to seriously question the present focus on market access for developed countries, at the expense of food sovereignty, livelihoods and rural development in developing countries.

The Mexican Experience: Displacement, Poverty, and Food Dependency Under NAFTA, Mexico agreed to total trade liberalization of all agricultural products by 2008. Although corn and beans, the nation's staple food crops, were given a fifteen-year adjustment period, in practice both have been liberalized before the adjustment period by government decisions to permit tariff-free imports above quota. In effect, corn faced zero-tariffs less than three years into the agreement.

The asymmetries between Canada, the United States, and Mexico in agricultural production were profound at the time of signing and have deepened since. Twenty-one percent of the Mexican population depends on farming for their livelihood, compared to only 2.8% in the U.S. Three-fourths of Mexican producers work fewer than five hectares. Important asymmetries exist in subsidies--the U.S. Farm bill authorizes over $200 billion in the next decade--, productivity, credit, natural resources, inputs, and transportation.

Corn is Mexico's most widely grown crop and the major source of sustenance in both rural and urban sectors. Mexico is the center of origin for corn, and the country's history and its 56 indigenous cultures revolve around maize. Corn imports have nearly tripled since NAFTA, and the price has dropped 64% since 1985. Genetically modified corn imports have contaminated local varieties, leading to fears of loss of biodiversity and increasing dependency on transnational seed and chemical companies.

Other crops have fared even worse. Soybeans, wheat, poultry, and beef imports have risen over 500%, displacing domestic production. Subsidized imports at dumping prices have also broken down vertical integration in growing agro-industrial sectors, like beer production.

The Mexican countryside lost 1.7 million jobs since NAFTA, in the context of little employment generation in other sectors. During the same period thousands of Mexicans migrated to the U.S., many to work in agriculture as undocumented workers without labor guarantees or benefits. Mexico has imported $78 billion worth of foods since 1994.

Promised compensation has not materialized. Exports have risen, especially in fruits and vegetables, but fail to compensate for imports. Agro-export crops cover only 8% of total cultivated land, compared to the three million producers of basic grains and oilseeds on 70% of Mexican farmland that has been devastated by imports. Agricultural niche-marketing, where the country is thought to have comparative advantages, has little room to grow due to supply-side constraints (water, climate, and soil conditions), lack of financing, and narrow markets. Agriculture has received only 0.3% of direct foreign investment.

Mexico has registered a negative balance of trade in agriculture over the decade of trade liberalization. Moreover, the government lost nearly $3 billion in revenues by failing to apply tariffs permitted under NAFTA.

Lessons for the WTO In sum, two decades of agricultural trade liberalization in Mexico have led to: an increase in rural poverty, malnutrition, out-migration, and instability; increased workloads, particularly for women; increased consumer prices; increased profits and market control by transnational traders and processors at the cost of smallholder farmers; lost national revenues that could have been applied to development programs; and severe risks to the environment and biodiversity.

By reflecting the market access priorities of developed countries that predominated in NAFTA, the Harbinson draft does nothing to reverse the negative tendencies of trade liberalization seen above.

First, because it fails to seriously take into account asymmetries in pursuing market access. The Agreement on Agriculture proposes "harmonizing," gradually or abruptly, market access on the foundation of enormous and unresolved asymmetries between nations, and between sectors within nations. Special and Differential Treatment--to the degree in which it has been defined--merely reduces tariff reduction requirements, often on the basis of already low tariff levels. The ability to exempt "Special Products" is severely limited by the fact that they would be determined by conflicting interests in the WTO rather than national rural development policies. Instead of creating a level playing field, this approach leads to the establishment of permanent disparities.

For all but a handful of heavily subsidized, well-capitalized, and often transnational agricultural interests, market access translates into market displacement. The food market is relatively inelastic. When the global market expands for nations and corporations with "comparative advantages," it expands based on the conquest of markets wrested from farmers in developing countries. The consequence is displacement of national food production and destruction of subsistence production systems.

Second, the Agreement perpetuates dumping practices while denying defensive tools to developing countries. Export subsidies would be phased out, instead of ended. Little is done to prevent indirect export subsides from being shifted to uncontrolled Green or Blue Box measures that wind up having the same net effect of encouraging overproduction and displacing developing country production within their own markets.

Income support payments also contribute to dumping on world markets, but they have very different practical functions in developed and developing countries. In net food-exporting countries, they serve primarily to subsidize traders by lowering the price they have to pay to producers, encouraging overproduction and enabling them to increase volumes sold abroad. In countries like Mexico, where over half of farms produce for family consumption, supports could mean the difference between a child starving or not.

Free Trade vs. National Development The debate in developing countries is not, at root, a debate between free trade and protectionism. It is a debate between the imposition of free trade rules at the cost of national development and well-being. In the complex and difficult context of a globalization that shows clear tendencies toward increasing inequity, and concentration and polarization of wealth, developing nations need to respond with policies that assure each citizen a basic standard of living. The Agreement on Agriculture, like NAFTA, binds national policymaking in a straitjacket just when developing countries must respond to new and dangerous challenges. At the same time, it exacerbates threats to food sovereignty, and eliminates important strategies for survival in the countryside that not only guarantee livelihoods but also support cultural, agricultural, and biological biodiversity.

The United Nations Development Program recently listed four principles of trade that have been largely forgotten in current debates focused on market access: 1) Trade is a means to an end, not an end in itself; 2) Trade rules must allow for diverse national institutional standards; 3) Countries have the right to protect their institutions and development priorities; 4) Countries do not have the right to impose their institutional preferences on others.

These simple rules imply a complete reorientation of the WTO, from trade promotion to a stronger focus on development and equity issues. Organizations of small farmers in developing countries have articulated a broad range of recommendations that must be considered to address the basic inequities of international trade in agriculture and protect the many roles rural production plays in society, including employment, food sovereignty and security, foreign exchange, and allocation of natural resources.

To end dumping, they call for an end to export subsidies in all forms, and the right to safeguard mechanisms or protective measures when deemed necessary. Mexican farmers associated with Via Campesina assert that this requires exempting food production and markets from the WTO to create new, more democratic mechanisms of regulation that respect food sovereignty and help rebuild local and regional markets. It also requires regulation of transnational trading oligopolies that create price distortion.

Farm support and agrarian reform programs based on human needs, that incorporate the goals of gender equity and respect for farmers' rights--above all the right to farm. Legislation and enforcement of national environmental and health standards, even when set higher than international standards, or those of partner nations. Impact studies based on real experience rather than theoretical modeling. Studies must take into account market failures due to concentration of transnational corporations and non-trade concerns. Commitment to preserving the multifunctional character of agriculture in a real and global way. The EU commitment to multifunctionality so far has been restricted to permitting measures that support developed country agriculture. Although non-trade concerns are even more vital in developing countries, no provisions have been made to support them where national government funds are insufficient. Even more importantly, there is no recognition of the impact of dumping on the ability of these countries to maintain agricultural activities that ensure global values, such as environmental conservation, employment, and food security. Democratization of international trade regulation, including correction of the under-representation of the Least Developed Countries--in most cases the most reliant on agriculture. International trade rules should promote human well-being and minimize conflict. They should not impose a free-trade system, because there is no global consensus that this is the only, or best, road to development and equity. Rather, experiences like Mexico's indicate that it is a road fraught with perils and high human costs.

Even optimal international trade rules will not solve the problems of rural development, due to the complexity of local and regional conditions and non-trade concerns. Only national integral development policies can do this. Domestic policy is a battle that must be fought on its own turf by the rural citizenry in the context of a responsive and democratic state. By tying the hands of national governments, the WTO Agreement on Agriculture will only exacerbate the crisis in the countryside and undermine democratic processes.

(Laura Carlsen directs the Americas Program (online at www.americaspolicy.org) of the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org). She can be contacted at .)

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October 12, 2003 THE WAY WE LIVE NOW The (Agri)Cultural Contradictions of Obesity By MICHAEL POLLAN

ometimes even complicated social problems turn out to be simpler than they look. Take America's ''obesity epidemic,'' arguably the most serious public-health problem facing the country. Three of every five Americans are now overweight, and some researchers predict that today's children will be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than that of their parents. The culprit, they say, is the health problems associated with obesity.

You hear several explanations. Big food companies are pushing supersize portions of unhealthful foods on us and our children. We have devolved into a torpid nation of couch potatoes. The family dinner has succumbed to the fast-food outlet. All these explanations are true, as far as they go. But it pays to go a little further, to look for the cause behind the causes. Which, very simply, is this: when food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat. Since 1977, an American's average daily intake of calories has jumped by more than 10 percent. Those 200 or so extra calories have to go somewhere. But the interesting question is, Where, exactly, did all those extra calories come from in the first place? And the answer takes us back to the source of all calories: the farm.

It turns out that we have been here before, sort of, though the last great American binge involved not food, but alcohol. It came during the first decades of the 19th century, when Americans suddenly began drinking more than they ever had before or have since, going on a collective bender that confronted the young republic with its first major public-health crisis -- the obesity epidemic of its day. Corn whiskey, suddenly superabundant and cheap, was the drink of choice, and in the 1820's the typical American man was putting away half a pint of the stuff every day. That works out to more than five gallons of spirits a year for every American. The figure today is less than a gallon.

As W.J. Rorabaugh tells the story in ''The Alcoholic Republic,'' we drank the hard stuff at breakfast, lunch and dinner, before work and after and very often during. Employers were expected to supply spirits over the course of the workday; in fact, the modern coffee break began as a late-morning whiskey break called ''the elevenses.'' (Just to pronounce it makes you sound tipsy.) Except for a brief respite Sunday mornings in church, Americans simply did not gather -- whether for a barn raising or quilting bee, corn husking or political campaign -- without passing the jug. Visitors from Europe -- hardly models of sobriety themselves -- marveled at the free flow of American spirits. ''Come on then, if you love toping,'' the journalist William Cobbett wrote his fellow Englishmen in a dispatch from America. ''For here you may drink yourself blind at the price of sixpence.''

The results of all this toping were entirely predictable: a rising tide of public drunkenness, violence and family abandonment and a spike in alcohol-related diseases. Several of the founding fathers -- including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams -- denounced the excesses of the ''alcoholic republic,'' inaugurating the American quarrel over drinking that would culminate a century later in Prohibition.

But the outcome of our national drinking binge is not nearly as relevant to our present predicament as its underlying cause. Which, put simply, was this: American farmers were producing way too much corn, especially in the newly settled areas west of the Appalachians, where fertile soil yielded one bumper crop after another. Much as it has today, the astounding productivity of American farmers proved to be their own worst enemy, as well as a threat to the public health. For when yields rise, the market is flooded with grain, and its price collapses. As a result, there is a surfeit of cheap calories that clever marketers sooner or later will figure out a way to induce us to consume.

In those days, the easiest thing to do with all that grain was to distill it. The Appalachian range made it difficult and expensive to transport surplus corn from the lightly settled Ohio River Valley to the more populous markets of the East, so farmers turned their corn into whiskey -- a more compact and portable ''value-added commodity.'' In time, the price of whiskey plummeted, to the point that people could afford to drink it by the pint, which is precisely what they did.

Nowadays, for somewhat different reasons, corn (along with most other agricultural commodities) is again abundant and cheap, and once again the easiest thing to do with the surplus is to turn it into more compact and portable value-added commodities: corn sweeteners, cornfed meat and chicken and highly processed foods of every description. The Alcoholic Republic has given way to the Republic of Fat, but in both cases, before the clever marketing, before the change in lifestyle, stands a veritable mountain of cheap grain. Until we somehow deal with this surfeit of calories coming off the farm, it is unlikely that even the most well-intentioned food companies or public-health campaigns will have much success changing the way we eat.

The underlying problem is agricultural overproduction, and that problem (while it understandably never receives quite as much attention as underproduction) is almost as old as agriculture itself. Even in the Old Testament, there's talk about how to deal not only with the lean times but also with the fat: the Bible advises creation of a grain reserve to smooth out the swings of the market in food. The nature of farming has always made it difficult to synchronize supply and demand. For one thing, there are the vagaries of nature: farmers may decide how many acres they will plant, but precisely how much food they produce in any year is beyond their control.

The rules of classical economics just don't seem to operate very well on the farm. When prices fall, for example, it would make sense for farmers to cut back on production, shrinking the supply of food to drive up its price. But in reality, farmers do precisely the opposite, planting and harvesting more food to keep their total income from falling, a practice that of course depresses prices even further. What's rational for the individual farmer is disastrous for farmers as a group. Add to this logic the constant stream of improvements in agricultural technology (mechanization, hybrid seed, agrochemicals and now genetically modified crops -- innovations all eagerly seized on by farmers hoping to stay one step ahead of falling prices by boosting yield), and you have a sure-fire recipe for overproduction -- another word for way too much food.

All this would be bad enough if the government weren't doing its best to make matters even worse, by recklessly encouraging farmers to produce even more unneeded food. Absurdly, while one hand of the federal government is campaigning against the epidemic of obesity, the other hand is actually subsidizing it, by writing farmers a check for every bushel of corn they can grow. We have been hearing a lot lately about how our agricultural policy is undermining our foreign-policy goals, forcing third-world farmers to compete against a flood tide of cheap American grain. Well, those same policies are also undermining our public-health goals by loosing a tide of cheap calories at home.

hile it is true that our farm policies are making a bad situation worse, adding mightily to the great mountain of grain, this hasn't always been the case with government support of farmers, and needn't be the case even now. For not all support programs are created equal, a fact that has been conveniently overlooked in the new free-market campaign to eliminate them.

In fact, farm programs in America were originally created as a way to shrink the great mountain of grain, and for many years they helped to do just that. The Roosevelt administration established the nation's first program of farm support during the Depression, though not, as many people seem to think, to feed a hungry nation. Then, as now, the problem was too much food, not too little; New Deal farm policy was designed to help farmers reeling from a farm depression caused by what usually causes a farm depression: collapsing prices due to overproduction. In Churdan, Iowa, recently, a corn farmer named George Naylor told me about the winter day in 1933 his father brought a load of corn to the grain elevator, where ''the price had been 10 cents a bushel the day before,'' and was told that suddenly, ''the elevator wasn't buying at any price.'' The price of corn had fallen to zero.

New Deal farm policy, quite unlike our own, set out to solve the problem of overproduction. It established a system of price supports, backed by a grain reserve, that worked to keep surplus grain off the market, thereby breaking the vicious cycle in which farmers have to produce more every year to stay even.

It is worth recalling how this system worked, since it suggests one possible path out of the current subsidy morass. Basically, the federal government set and supported a target price (based on the actual cost of production) for storable commodities like corn. When the market price dropped below the target, a farmer was given an option: rather than sell his harvest at the low price, he could take out what was called a ''nonrecourse loan,'' using his corn as collateral, for the full value of his crop. The farmer then stored his corn until the market improved, at which point he sold it and used the proceeds to repay the loan. If the market failed to improve that year, the farmer could discharge his debt simply by handing his corn over to the government, which would add it to something called, rather quaintly, the ''ever-normal granary.'' This was a grain reserve managed by the U.S.D.A., which would sell from it whenever prices spiked (during a bad harvest, say), thereby smoothing out the vicissitudes of the market and keeping the cost of food more or less steady -- or ''ever normal.''

This wasn't a perfect system by any means, but it did keep cheap grain from flooding the market and by doing so supported the prices farmers received. And it did this at a remarkably small cost to the government, since most of the loans were repaid. Even when they weren't, and the government was left holding the bag (i.e., all those bushels of collateral grain), the U.S.D.A. was eventually able to unload it, and often did so at a profit. The program actually made money in good years. Compare that with the current subsidy regime, which costs American taxpayers about $19 billion a year and does virtually nothing to control production.

So why did we ever abandon this comparatively sane sort of farm policy? Politics, in a word. The shift from an agricultural-support system designed to discourage overproduction to one that encourages it dates to the early 1970's -- to the last time food prices in America climbed high enough to generate significant political heat. That happened after news of Nixon's 1972 grain deal with the Soviet Union broke, a disclosure that coincided with a spell of bad weather in the farm belt. Commodity prices soared, and before long so did supermarket prices for meat, milk, bread and other staple foods tied to the cost of grain. Angry consumers took to the streets to protest food prices and staged a nationwide meat boycott to protest the high cost of hamburger, that American birthright. Recognizing the political peril, Nixon ordered his secretary of agriculture, Earl (Rusty) Butz, to do whatever was necessary to drive down the price of food.

Butz implored America's farmers to plant their fields ''fence row to fence row'' and set about dismantling 40 years of farm policy designed to prevent overproduction. He shuttered the ever-normal granary, dropped the target price for grain and inaugurated a new subsidy system, which eventually replaced nonrecourse loans with direct payments to farmers. The distinction may sound technical, but in effect it was revolutionary. For instead of lending farmers money so they could keep their grain off the market, the government offered to simply cut them a check, freeing them to dump their harvests on the market no matter what the price.

The new system achieved exactly what it was intended to: the price of food hasn't been a political problem for the government since the Nixon era. Commodity prices have steadily declined, and in the perverse logic of agricultural economics, production has increased, as farmers struggle to stay solvent. As you can imagine, the shift from supporting agricultural prices to subsidizing much lower prices has been a boon to agribusiness companies because it slashes the cost of their raw materials. That's why Big Food, working with the farm-state Congressional delegations it lavishly supports, consistently lobbies to maintain a farm policy geared to high production and cheap grain. (It doesn't hurt that those lightly populated farm states exert a disproportionate influence in Washington, since it takes far fewer votes to elect a senator in Kansas than in California. That means agribusiness can presumably ''buy'' a senator from one of these underpopulated states for a fraction of what a big-state senator costs.)

But as we're beginning to recognize, our cheap-food farm policy comes at a high price: first there's the $19 billion a year the government pays to keep the whole system afloat; then there's the economic misery that the dumping of cheap American grain inflicts on farmers in the developing world; and finally there's the obesity epidemic at home -- which most researchers date to the mid-70's, just when we switched to a farm policy consecrated to the overproduction of grain. Since that time, farmers in the United States have managed to produce 500 additional calories per person every day; each of us is, heroically, managing to pack away about 200 of those extra calories per day. Presumably the other 300 -- most of them in the form of surplus corn -- get dumped on overseas markets or turned into ethanol.

Cheap corn, the dubious legacy of Earl Butz, is truly the building block of the ''fast-food nation.'' Cheap corn, transformed into high-fructose corn syrup, is what allowed Coca-Cola to move from the svelte 8-ounce bottle of soda ubiquitous in the 70's to the chubby 20-ounce bottle of today. Cheap corn, transformed into cheap beef, is what allowed McDonald's to supersize its burgers and still sell many of them for no more than a dollar. Cheap corn gave us a whole raft of new highly processed foods, including the world-beating chicken nugget, which, if you study its ingredients, you discover is really a most ingenious transubstantiation of corn, from the cornfed chicken it contains to the bulking and binding agents that hold it together.

You would have thought that lower commodity prices would represent a boon to consumers, but it doesn't work out that way, not unless you believe a 32-ounce Big Gulp is a great deal. When the raw materials for food become so abundant and cheap, the clever strategy for a food company is not necessarily to lower prices -- to do that would only lower its revenues. It makes much more sense to compete for the consumer's dollar by increasing portion sizes -- and as Greg Critser points out in his recent book ''Fat Land,'' the bigger the portion, the more food people will eat. So McDonald's tempts us by taking a 600-calorie meal and jacking it up to 1,550 calories. Compared with that of the marketing, packaging and labor, the cost of the added ingredients is trivial.

Such cheap raw materials also argue for devising more and more highly processed food, because the real money will never be in selling cheap corn (or soybeans or rice) but in ''adding value'' to that commodity. Which is one reason that in the years since the nation moved to a cheap-food farm policy, the number and variety of new snack foods in the supermarket have ballooned. The game is in figuring out how to transform a penny's worth of corn and additives into a $3 bag of ginkgo biloba-fortified brain-function-enhancing puffs, or a dime's worth of milk and sweeteners into Swerve, a sugary new ''milk based'' soft drink to be sold in schools. It's no coincidence that Big Food has suddenly ''discovered'' how to turn milk into junk food: the government recently made deep cuts in the dairy-farm program, and as a result milk is nearly as cheap a raw material as water.

As public concern over obesity mounts, the focus of political pressure has settled on the food industry and its marketing strategies -- supersizing portions, selling junk food to children, lacing products with transfats and sugars. Certainly Big Food bears some measure of responsibility for our national eating disorder -- a reality that a growing number of food companies have publicly accepted. In recent months, Kraft, McDonald's and Coca-Cola have vowed to change marketing strategies and even recipes in an effort to help combat obesity and, no doubt, ward off the coming tide of litigation.

There is an understandable reluctance to let Big Food off the hook. Yet by devising ever more ingenious ways to induce us to consume the surplus calories our farmers are producing, the food industry is only playing by a set of rules written by our government. (And maintained, it is true, with the industry's political muscle.) The political challenge now is to rewrite those rules, to develop a new set of agricultural policies that don't subsidize overproduction -- and overeating. For unless we somehow deal with the mountain of cheap grain that makes the Happy Meal and the Double Stuf Oreo such ''bargains,'' the calories are guaranteed to keep coming.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

NAFTA'S SMOKING GUN:
WHO DUNNIT AND WHY ?

Can you think of any nation on Earth that would sit idly by and watch its factories and jobs move offshore, and put its own taxpayers out of work? Name one nation on the planet that uses its taxpayer's funds to assist factories to move or expand offshore, and then close operations back in the homeland, and then fire its own workers? There is only one. The United States of America.

Turn the clock back to the early 1970s. Henry Kissinger was flitting around the globe and spending time in the Middle-East. U.S. policy was providing aid and comfort to the various warring enemy factions in the explosive region. OPEC was raising oil prices, and putting a stranglehold on the USA at the gas pump. David Rockefeller at the Chase Manhattan Bank, and the others on Wall Street, lusted to get their hands on the vast sums of surplus petro-dollars held by the oil sheiks. They soon did. That's when the problem began.

Soon the New York bankers were taking in mountains of dollars from the Middle East, and loaning them back out to "Third-world" countries in Latin America. While the international rich elite understood the "art of the deal," the peasant classes in Mexico and Latin America were only one step above the stone age. Ambitious industrial projects failed and the massive debt could not be repaid. Mexico alone defaulted on over $100 billion owed to New York Banks, and the banks were under pressure by the Middle East sheiks who wanted their money back. What to do ?

According to the July 25, 1989 edition of "FINANCIAL WORLD" magazine, meetings to rescue Mexico and get the banks paid, had been held off-and-on in New York since 1987. The investigative article titled, "Sweat Equity" indicates that the most favored scheme was to industrialize Mexico into a low-cost, export-producing giant. The banks would then get a piece of the overall export profits to be paid toward their principal and interest. The unpaid principal balance would be rolled-over each year and whatever could be paid against it credited. Such a system would let Mexico pay the debt painlessly from new income streams. Even better, the banks would be paid! No consideration was given to the devastation this policy would cause to the American worker and middle-class. They were the source to provide the needed wealth from their everyday consumer spending and thus an expendable factor.

This concept was further promoted in the book, "LATIN AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS," which was written and published in August of 1990, by David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission think-tank based in New York and Washington. It was easy to get the book accepted as USA policy because Jimmy Carter, George Bush and Bill Clinton were all members of the elite club. In fact, the Trilateral Commission member list reads like a WHO'S WHO of government and politics. White House insiders are also often members of the Council On Foreign Relations, which is also nurtured by, and serves the same international and New York financial interests.

Shortly after the Trilateral book was published, a momentum developed to implement the scheme in a legalized method. While congress could not sit still for such a transfer of wealth and jobs by official treaty, another idea was developed. To give the scheme a slim chance at all, the power elite called it an "Agreement" which needed only a simple majority of Congress to pass, and could be "Fast Tracked" to avoid the normal scrutiny. To that end, the thousands of pages of the North American Free Trade Agreement were kept secret from the citizens and press until long after it was signed. Lawmakers and the press were instead given a 45 page "Summary" that was upbeat and filled with happy-talk. Most of the lawmakers on Capitol Hill, financial columnists, and economists who support NAFTA have a curious common denominator. They haven't read it!

Once "released" by the Government, the massive two-volume work was priced at $41.00 and only available through the handful of U.S. Government Printing Office outlets. These stores are not a favorite of "Window Shoppers," and only a few hundred beltway insiders even wanted the document. They naturally wouldn't say much against the policy that had been established earlier. A few voices such as Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Chuck Harder, Pat Buchanan, Jerry Brown, and Rev. Jesse Jackson soon spoke out with concern, but the media was able to filter them out and keep most of them from reaching large audiences.

Ross Perot also soon found it difficult to buy good TV time and he became a target of ridicule for his actions against NAFTA. While the "curtain of silence" fell upon anti-NAFTA voices, a strange round of "Shotgun weddings" took place as big media suddenly got merger-mania. Radio crackled with activity, and Westwood One, the owner of NBC,

Mutual, The Source and Talknet, married New York's Unistar. TV soon pictured romance, and a mega-deal cooking with Bell Atlantic, TCI and Liberty Media was the big story. Word was quietly out in the boardrooms that the USA consumers would soon take a monster hit-in-the-pocket-book over NAFTA, and only the strong media would survive. Providing a futuristic metaphor, "USA TODAY" newspaper even revamped its colorful back weather page this summer to include all of Canada and Mexico, while the outline of the continental USA shrunk.

The biggest USA national media corporations also fell in love with the deal after being promised expansion into Mexico to reach new audiences. New American technology to offer 500 channel cable-TV loomed as another threat to take more domestic audience with shrinking bank accounts away from the big network media players. Soon deals were

cooking in the boardrooms to have more USA media merge, and also take positions in the Mexican press and broadcast industry. The big banks, Wall Street, and the stockmarket loved it!

Remember that NAFTA is not a new invention. The banker/politician combine had quietly created policy years ago to allow the set up of the "Maquilladora Region" as a pilot-program along the US-Mexican border. Soon over 2,200 USA factories moved into that 12 mile strip of Mexico during the period from the late 1980's onward. Much had been learned from the early years of operations, and new procedures using low-skill Mexican peasants had been perfected. Industrial engineers learned new designs for assembly operations, and USA trade magazines now report these techniques ready for the expected thousands of new plants and expanded facilities in Mexico as soon as NAFTA becomes law and expands deep into the Mexican continent. Recent financial and real estate conventions held in Washington with capacity-crowds, have also focused on the massive "get rich" Mexican opportunities to soon be created under NAFTA.

To seal the deal, the Mexican billionaire families put up millions of dollars to assist the Salinas government to buy the best lobbyists in Washington. The list of highly paid Mexican agents reads like an "Alumni Roster" of Capitol Hill. The Clinton administration has also announced that, "The store is open." The White House will hand out necessary goodies to sway the undecided members of Congress. The "Fix" is in!

Left out of the deal are the American people. Nobody can explain to them how it's good for America to have millions of jobs move to Mexico? How can USA workers compete with frightened Mexican peasants making 58 cents or a dollar an hour? Government retraining programs have been exposed as multi-billion-dollar-hoaxes because new high-tech jobs don't exist! Unemployed USA workers with families to feed, and mortgages to pay, can't find replacement jobs at the same pay scale, if at all! A permanent underclass is developing and crime is on the increase. In 1994, government regulations will require heads of welfare families to go back to work. Where will those millions of jobs be found ? The NAFTA scheme to pay back the New York banks makes Charles Keating, (the convicted S & L crook), look like Peter Pan. Willing co-conspirators on Capitol Hill don't personally fear the anticipated financial ruin, as they all are vested with government pensions and "Golden Parachutes." The Middle-Class will be affected. They could be retrained to become docile peasants. The "American Dream" and "Rule of Law" is at risk.

Source: http://www.forthepeople.org/NAFTA.htm

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