DURHAM -- The initial blush from the 20-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement among the U.S., Canada and Mexico has long since faded. We're left with a dying U.S. manufacturing sector, rising unemployment, worsening immigration tensions and an increasingly unstable Mexico.
Now, President Barack Obama has sent three new free-trade agreements to Congress, including the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Here we go again.
The dirty open secret is that there was nothing free about NAFTA trade, especially when it came to agriculture. For example, the United State subsidizes American crops such as corn. Before NAFTA, Mexico taxed U.S. corn imports in order to even out the playing field. Then the free trade agreement all of a sudden made it cheaper for Mexicans to buy corn from the U.S. than from their own neighborhood farmers.
That sounds good for us. But it also put millions of Mexican small farmers out of business, which meant that many came looking for work here. Others have faced an unenviable choice between facing starvation or growing drug crops.
Look at the Central America Free Trade Agreement and one of its signatories, Nicaragua. This past June, Witness for Peace led a delegation of U.S. teens to Nicaragua. They toured a Taiwanese-owned factory making The North Face jackets, which retail in the U.S. for upward of $180. The factory paid its workers $4-$6 for 10-hour days - even in Nicaragua, that's not a living wage.
The only thing the U.S. got out of the North Face factory in Nicaragua was increased profits for the San Francisco-based corporation and its Greensboro-based parent company, VF Corp. But profits do not equal jobs.
Finally, free-trade agreements, as we've come to know them, do nothing to protect labor leaders and the environment from harassment and despoliation the name of economic expediency.
The problem isn't the "free trade" part. There are some agreements that would actually do what the proponents of free trade are always talking about: open markets, create more jobs for the middle class, foster greater prosperity and security for all.
The problem with these proposed agreements is that they're drafted to favor corporations over people and profits over jobs. The winners win big, but there are more losers.
If we pass the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, with a country where union leaders have been harassed and killed with chilling frequency, it will destroy Colombia's small farmers, just as NAFTA did in Mexico. It will further hobble American industry. And it will lead to more violence and more immigration, which will directly affect Americans here at home.
This free-trade model is broken. We need something else.
Here's the Colombia trade agreement Congress could and should pass: one that protects workers' rights by including minimum labor standards, one that protects the environment through minimum environmental standards; and one that protects U.S. jobs by putting some of the money from corporate windfalls not just into unemployment benefits for the American workers laid off in the process, as has been proposed, but into education and retraining so these workers can pursue new careers.
That's the kind of trade agreement that would economic sense and common sense. But first our elected officials must have the courage to say "no" to the status quo and reject the broken old model.
