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A group of Mexican farmer leaders and academics believe that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's pledge to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, will be a good opportunity to review areas of the treaty that are not favorable to the sector in Mexico.
Experts say that after 23 years of its implementation, NAFTA, signed by Mexico, the United States and Canada in the early 90s, has helped dismantle Mexico's agricultural production system through neoliberal policies that have left millions of poor farmers without state support and have increased the country's food dependency on aboard, La Jornada reported Tuesday.
Since his presidential campaign, Trump has vowed to force Canada and Mexico to negotiate the trade deal saying it has been detrimental to the manufacturing industry in the United States, sending shocking waves of uncertainty for the already weakened Mexican economy.
[...] In the years that have followed the NAFT signing, the Mexican government has sold itself as a pro-business and lower-cost alternative for U.S. companies and in the process became a manufacturing powerhouse of cars, computers, aerospace technology and televisions.
However, the modernization process also helped dismantle the national agricultural system, which has practically disappeared, according to analysts and producers.
Source: teleSUR
(Score: 1) by RS3 on Friday December 30 2016, @05:33PM
I respectfully disagree- there are millions here in the USA who have been freed from mundane jobs. I call that a win.
/sarcasm
(Score: 4, Informative) by butthurt on Friday December 30 2016, @07:31PM
The maquiladoras in Mexico employ "approximately one million workers," someone has written in Wikipedia with a citation I didn't check.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquiladora#Growth_and_development [wikipedia.org]
Prior to NAFTA there existed maquiladoras--although far fewer of them. So it's probably a bit fewer than a million people in Mexico who are employed making things because of NAFTA.
If the duty-free U.S.–Mexican trade were ended, one factor that would inhibit factories from locating in the U.S. is the much higher wages there. Fortunately, Republican Party politicians have a solution: repeal the federal minimum wage and forbid ("preempt") local minimum wage laws.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/08/federal-minimum-wage-trump [theguardian.com]
http://www.natlawreview.com/article/ohio-adopts-preemption-legislation-blocking-local-minimum-wage-hikes-and-other-local [natlawreview.com]
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/ohios-kasich-blocks-local-control-over-minimum-wage [msnbc.com]
Then, the choice of having a minimum wage or not will be up to the states. They'll be able to forgo it, or set it at a level where labour can compete against workers in the Third World, or against robots (there are 19 states that aren't yet on board, and are raising their minimum wages).
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/12/29/_19_states_set_to_raise_the_minimum_wage_in_new_year.html [slate.com]
Viva América!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @01:11AM
> The maquiladoras in Mexico employ "approximately one million workers," someone has written in Wikipedia with a citation I didn't check.
You should have checked. That number is well over a decade out of date, the paper its from was published in 2004 [elsevier.com] so it probably doesn't include numbers past 2003. I would update the wikipedia article to include the link to the paper myself, but I'm on a VPN and wikipedia won't let me do edits because of my IP address.
The combination of automation and China's gangbusters growth for much of the previous decade suggests that maquiladora employment has decreased significantly since that paper was written.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Sunday January 01 2017, @06:21AM
You've impelled me to check, and from the snippet Highbeam showed me as a non-subscriber, I see that the information in the cited paper is from 14 years ago:
At the end of 2002, it was estimated that 3,251 maquiladoras (down from 3,590 in 2000) in Mexico employed more than one million people and imported more than $51 billion in supplies into Mexico.
-- https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-115835888.html [highbeam.com]