Alan Liang POSCI 2 5/8/12 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) The North American Free Trade

Agreement is a signed agreement negotiated between the governments of The United States, Canada, and Mexico. This process created a trade block based of the continent of North America. The North American Free Trade Agreement took place on January 1st, 1994 and took in effect as the Canada superseded between the boarder of United States and Canada. This agreement will remove most of the barriers to trade and investments among the three countries. All non-tariff barriers based of the agriculture trade between the United States and Mexico were eliminated. Tariffs were eliminated as well with others being phased out over periods of 5-15 years. As of today, NAFTA is the largest trade bloc in the world. NAFTA has two different supplements; the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC), and the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC). In 1986, Leaders made negotiations to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement in San Antonio, Texas. This included United States President George Bush, Canadian Prime Minister, Brian Mulrone, and Mexican President Carlos Salinas. As of their responsibilities, they made promotions of the Agreement and ceremonially signed it. The agreement had then been ratified by each nations legislative and parliamentary branch. Before everything was finalized, Bill Clinton was voted as president of the United States, and Kim Campbell was the President of Canada, and before the NAFTA agreement was finalized, Jean Chretien had taken office in Canada. The main goal of NAFTA was to eliminate barriers to trade and investments between the boarders of United States and Mexico. Mainly this agreement had eliminated tariffs which were more than of Mexicos exports to the United States, and more than 1/3 of United States exports to Mexico. Within ten years of the implementation of agreement, all United States and Mexico tariffs would also be eliminated. NAFTA was seeking to eliminate non-tariff trade barriers and to protect intellectual property right of the product.

As the process of NAFTA, its effects had affected both positive and negative. Some argued that NAFTA has been positive for Mexico because it has seen its poverty rates fall and real income had rise especially for the form of lower prices on products and foods. Others had argued that NAFTA has been beneficial to business owners and elites in all three countries. It does have a negative effect for farmers in Mexico because of the food prices fall based on cheap imports from the United States agribusiness. Also it gave negative impacts on United States workers in manufacturing and assembly industries who lost jobs. The NAFTA provides coverage to services with the exception of aviation transport, maritime, and basic telecommunications. The agreement also provides property rights protection in a variety of areas including patent, trademark, and copyrighted material. The governments provisions of the NAFTA apply not only to goods but to contracts for services and construction at the federal level. Additionally, U.S. investors are guaranteed equal treatment to domestic investors in Mexico and Canada. Overall investment from the United States to Canada and Mexico reached $628 billion in 2009, growing 75% percent since 2003. As of the trade, the agreement opened to door for open trades as it was near the ending for tariffs on different types of goods and services. NAFTA has allowed agriculture goods such as eggs, corn, and meats to be tax free. This has given the advantage for both imports and exports for free trade in the North America. Canada had exported $248.2 billion while Mexico exported $163.3 billion, that being said they were among the top two purchasers of the United States exports as of 2010. United States goods exported to NAFTA in 2010 for $411.5 billion which increased up to $23.4. Canada imported $276.4 billion while Mexico imported $229.7 billion. NAFTA opponents included labor, environmental, consumer, and religious groups. They argued that NAFTA would provide a start to the bottom wages. This had destroyed thousands of good United States jobs, undermine democratic control based off of domestic policy-making and threaten health environmental such as food safety standards. NAFTA promoters included many of the worlds largest corporations and promised it would create hundreds of thousands of new high wattage United States jobs. This raise living stands in the United States, Mexico, and Canada which had improve many of the environmental conditions and transformed Mexico from a bad organization poor income country into one of the hottest new market of the United States exports.

Mexico and Canada reached a separate bilateral NAFTA agreement on market access for agriculture products. The agreement between those two countries eliminated most tariffs as the year has passed by. Tariffs between the two countries affecting the trade such as dairy, eggs, sugar, poultry, meat, and etc., were all maintained. NAFTA requires limits based of the safeties such as inspection of meat sound in the world wide grocery stores. They made a new patent ruled that raised medicine prices because of the constraints on a local governments ability to zone against toxication. As a matter of fact, some people said that NAFTA trade was a misleading. NAFTA is really just an investment that the three countries were trying to make a agreement on. Its core provisions grant foreign investors a remarkable set of new rights and different types of privileges that can promote relocation abroad of factories and jobs. Throughout the entire world, people suffering with the consequences of this disastrous experiment are mainly the organizations out there that demands for the better world we know, but we face a race against time. The same interests who got us into NAFTA are pushing to expand it to include 31 more countries in Central and South America through the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). In 2005, Congress voted to extend NAFTA to five Central American countries through the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) such as Peru which was added in 2007; and there are signed NAFTA expansions with Panama and Colombia as well. However these have not been taken up by Congress. Now, over a decade 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.

Bibliography: a. http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/trade/trade_programs/international_agreements/free_trade/n afta/ b. http://www.fas.usda.gov/itp/policy/nafta/nafta.asp c. http://www.citizen.org/Page.aspx?pid=531 d. http://export.gov/FTA/nafta/index.asp