Frontera NorteSur / MexiData.info

NAFTA at Fourteen: Historic Mexico-USA showdown looms

Anti-NAFTA activists charge the trade pact has resulted in the loss of between 1.8 million and 3 million farm jobs during the last 14 years. Mexican Congressman Hector Padilla, the president of the agriculture committee in the Chamber of Deputies, said the rural hemorrhaging was even worse if statistics from 1991 are taken into account. According to Padilla, the number of people employed in the countryside plummeted from 9.9 million in 1991 to 4.9 million in 2006. As is widely documented, many of the displaced campesinos emigrated to the United States.

As the 14th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) fast approaches, rural opponents of the trinational pact are stepping up their mobilizations on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Mexican farm groups and their supporters are gearing up for border-wide actions on January 1, 2008 to protest the final elimination of…

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