Activists and academics from Canada, the United States and Mexico called in March in Mexico for an end to the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), because of its secrecy and because it fails to represent the interests of the people of the three nations. Credit: Emilio Godoy / IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Apr 4 2018 (IPS)

Statements by U.S. President Donald Trump against Mexico have begun to permeate the presidential election campaign in this Latin American country, forcing the candidates to pronounce themselves on the matter.

In his most recent angry tweet, Trump said Apr. 1 that he would withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) if Mexico doesn’t work harder to stop illegal immigration and drug trafficking into the U.S.

The next few days will be crucial for the renegotiation of the trade deal between Mexico, the U.S. and Canada."After Trump's remarks, everything is up in the air. We will hear statements back and forth from the negotiating parties and the candidates. Any sign of having anything in common with Trump is political suicide for the candidates." -- Manuel Pérez Rocha

“After Trump’s remarks, everything is up in the air. We will hear statements back and forth from the negotiating parties and the candidates. Any sign of having anything in common with Trump is political suicide for the candidates,” said Manuel Pérez Rocha, Associate Fellow at the U.S. Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.

The expert told IPS that “the important thing is to continue analysing the proposals of the candidates and see what positions they take with respect to NAFTA.”

The eighth, and presumably last, round of negotiations is scheduled to begin on Apr. 8 in Washington and end on Apr. 16.

After the seven previous rounds, the advances disclosed by the three partners have been scarce, in negotiations marked by rigid positions, tension and secrecy.

Of the 30 chapters that have been discussed, the negotiating teams have concluded the chapters on good regulatory practices, transparency, sanitary and phytosanitary measures, small and medium-sized businesses, competition and anti-corruption.

The priorities of the United States include new phytosanitary measures, greater protection of intellectual property, labour and environmental matters and the possible elimination of the dispute resolution chapter, which establishes special panels to address abusive trade practices.

Meanwhile, Mexico is focusing mainly on energy, electronic commerce and small and medium enterprises.

Canada, for its part, prioritises the inclusion of labour, environmental and gender standards, an increased migratory flow, indigenous rights, a revision of the dispute resolution mechanism, a more open government procurement market and higher wages.

The renegotiation of the treaty in force since 1994 also covers issues not included in the original text, such as energy, e-commerce and on-line activities.

The renegotiation of NAFTA was imposed by Trump, who included it in the campaign that took him to the White House in January 2017.

NAFTA and, above all, Trump’s outbursts about Mexico and Mexicans have begun to appear in the campaign for Mexico’s Jul. 1 presidential elections, although only the front-runner has addressed it explicitly.

Leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, heading the “Together We Make History” coalition, said on Apr. 1 that “we are not going to rule out the possibility of convincing Donald Trump of his mistaken foreign policy and in particular of his contemptuous attitude towards Mexicans, we will be very respectful of the government of the United States, but we will also demand respect for Mexicans.”

The three-time candidate for the Mexican presidency expressed his support for NAFTA, but clarified that “it would be best to sign agreements after Jul. 1,” when he hopes to finally win the presidency with the support of an alliance between the leftist National Regeneration Movement and Workers’ Party, together with the conservative Social Encounter Party.

A protest against U.S. President Donald Trump outside the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. Trump’s verbal attacks against Mexico and Mexicans have increased since March and are beginning to reverberate in the campaign for the Jul. 1 presidential elections. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

The second in the polls, Ricardo Anaya, candidate for the “Mexico al Frente” coalition, formed by the right-wing National Action Party, the centrist Party of the Democratic Revolution, and the centre-right Citizen’s Movement, has not referred to the renegotiation.

Nor has the ruling party candidate José Meade, representing the conservative Institutional Revolutionary Party, the Ecologist Green Party and the New Alliance, mentioned NAFTA or Trump so far in the campaign.

None of the candidates have discussed Trump’s promise to build a border wall between the two countries.

“Mexico has to withdraw from negotiations to reform the treaty and wait for a new government to take over the process. We can’t tolerate all of these insults and threats from Trump,” academic Alberto Arroyo, a member of the non-governmental coalition Mexico Better without FTAs, told IPS.

The car industry, “maquilas” or for-export assembly plants, agro-exports and financial services are among the sectors that have benefited from the 24 years of free trade between the three countries.

According to academics and activists from the affected sectors, the big losers under NAFTA have been small-scale farmers, including producers of the staple products corn and beans, and the food sector in general.

NAFTA strengthened Mexico’s trade dependency on the U.S., which purchases more than 80 percent of Mexico’s exports.

Imports from the United States, meanwhile, climbed from 151 billion dollars in 1993 to 614 billion dollars in 2017 – a 307 percent increase. Meanwhile, its exports grew from 142 billion to 525 billion, a 270 percent rise.

“Any disruption to the economic relationship could have adverse effects on investment, employment, productivity, and North American competitiveness,” says the study “NAFTA Renegotiation and Modernization,” prepared by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), a non-partisan legislative branch agency housed in the Library of Congress.

The report published in February adds that “Mexico and Canada could consider imposing retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports if the United States were to withdraw” from NAFTA.

In 2017, the United States a trade deficit of 89.6 billion dollars with its two partners, compared with 9.1 billion in 1993.

“It is not clear how the (Trump) administration would expect to reduce the trade deficit through the renegotiation,” says the paper.

In another of his attacks, Trump threatened to impose extraordinary tariffs on steel and aluminum imports unless NAFTA were renegotiated to terms more favorable to the U.S

According to Pérez Rocha, Mexicans would celebrate the end of NAFTA as “a net job destroyer, and for allowing transnational corporations to devastate the environment.”

He added that, in his opinion, the majority of Mexico’s 123 million people would support an end to the treaty “for destroying the livelihoods of millions in rural areas, for being an instrument of corporations for reversing sanitary and environmental policies, and for making Mexico the Latin American country with the most obesity.”

He called for postponing the renegotiation until the new administration takes office, because “this government has been unable to ensure the interests of Mexicans. We need a change to society, a new way of interacting with all social sectors.”

For his part, Arroyo, who is writing a study on NAFTA’s impact on the Mexican economy, called for a treaty that respects “human, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, the national sovereignty of each country and real economic development.”

The CRS report concludes that the outlook for the renegotiation is “uncertain”.

Today, the United States and Mexico are more and more similar to what English journalist Alan Riding once described as “distant neighbours.”

The migrants photographed here were being loaded on to a cargo plane in Kufra, located in southeastern Libya. Credit: Rebecca Murray/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 3 2015 (IPS)

The military conflicts and political instability driving hundreds of thousands of refugees into Europe were triggered largely by U.S. and Western military interventions for regime change – specifically in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria (a regime change in-the-making).

The United States was provided with strong military support by countries such as Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Spain, while the no-fly zone to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was led by France and the UK in 2011 and aided by Belgium, Denmark, Norway and Canada, among others.

“[European leaders] stay silent about the military intervention and regime change in which Europeans were major actors, interventions that have torn the refugees’ homelands apart and resulted in civil war and state collapse.” -- James A. Paul, former executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum
Last week, an unnamed official of a former Eastern European country, now an integral part of the 28-nation European Union (EU), was constrained to ask: “Why should we provide homes for these refugees when we didn’t invade their countries?”

This reaction could have come from any of the former Soviet bloc countries, including Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia or Latvia – all of them now members of the EU, which has an open-door policy for transiting migrants and refugees.

The United States was directly involved in regime change in Afghanistan (in 2001) and Iraq (in 2003) – and has been providing support for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad battling a civil war now in its fifth year.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who says he is “horrified and heartbroken” at the loss of lives of refugees and migrants in the Mediterranean and Europe, points out that a large majority of people “undertaking these arduous and dangerous journeys are refugees fleeing from places such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.”

James A. Paul, former executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS the term “regime change refugees” is an excellent way to change the empty conversation about the refugee crisis.

Obviously, there are many causes, but “regime change” helps focus on a crucial part of the picture, he added.

Official discourse in Europe frames the civil wars and economic turmoil in terms of fanaticism, corruption, dictatorship, economic failures and other causes for which they have no responsibility, Paul said.

“They stay silent about the military intervention and regime change in which Europeans were major actors, interventions that have torn the refugees’ homelands apart and resulted in civil war and state collapse.”

The origins of the refugees make the case clearly: Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan are major sources, he pointed out.

Also many refugees come from the Balkans where the wars of the 1990s, again involving European complicity, shredded those societies and led to the present economic and social collapse, he noted.

Vijay Prashad, professor of international studies at Trinity College, Connecticut, and the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History, told IPS the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention was dated.

He said the Covenant “was written up for the time of the Cold War – when those who were fleeing the so-called Unfree World were to be welcomed to the Free World”.

He said many Third World states refused this covenant because of the horrid ideology behind it.

“We need a new Covenant,” he said, one that specifically takes into consideration economic refugees (driven by the International Monetary Fund) and political (war) refugees.

At the same time, he said, the international community should also recognize “climate change refugees, regime change refugees and NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement] refugees.”

The 1951 Convention guarantees refugee status if one “has a well-founded fear of persecution because of his/her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.”

Asked about the Eastern European reaction, Prashad said: “I agree entirely. But of course one didn’t hear such a sentiment from Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and others – who also welcomed refugees in large numbers. Why say, ‘Why should we take [them]?’ Why not say, ‘Why are they [Western Europe and the U.S.] not doing more?’” he asked.

While Western European countries are complaining about the hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding their shores, the numbers are relatively insignificant compared to the 3.5 million Syrian refugees hosted by Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon – none of which invaded any of the countries from where most of the refugees are originating.

Paul told IPS the huge flow of refugees into Europe has created a political crisis in many recipient countries, especially Germany, where neo-Nazi thugs battle police almost daily, while fire-bombings of refugee housing have alarmed the political establishment.

The public have been horrified by refugees drowning in the Mediterranean, deaths in trucks and railway tunnels, thousands of children and families caught on the open seas, facing border fences and mobilized security forces.

Religious leaders call for tolerance, while EU politicians wring their hands and wonder how they can solve the issue with new rules and more money, Paul said.

“But the refugee flow is increasing rapidly, with no end in sight.  Fences cannot contain the desperate multitudes.”

He said a few billion euros in economic assistance to the countries of origin, recently proposed by the Germans, are unlikely to buy away the problem.

“Only a clear understanding of the origins of the crisis can lead to an answer, but European leaders do not want to touch this hot wire and expose their own culpability.”

Paul said some European leaders, the French in particular, are arguing in favour of military intervention in these troubled lands on their periphery as a way of doing something.

Overthrowing Assad appears to be popular among the policy classes in Paris, who choose to ignore how counter-productive their overthrow of Libyan leader Gaddafi was a short time ago, or how counter-productive has been their clandestine support in Syria for the Islamist rebels, he declared.

Paul also said “the aggressive nationalist beast in the rich country establishments is not ready to learn the lesson, or to beware the “blowback” from future interventions.”

“This is why we need to look closely at the ‘regime change’ angle and to mobilize the public understanding that this was a crisis that was largely ‘Made in Europe’ – with the active connivance of Washington, of course,” he declared.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

The United States is not really a democracy. That’s the (simplified) conclusion of a recent study from Princeton University. Instead, economic elites and special interest groups enjoy tremendous sway in Washington, while “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

Indeed, the institutions of democracy and sovereignty exist in tension with another powerful institution: the global market and its free trade regimes.Contemporary trade agreements actually have very little to do with trade. Rather, the TPP will probably have its greatest impact on domestic regulations and standards.

In one sense, the free-market system sustains democracy. It generates wealth and tempers the centralisation of power — two preconditions for democracy. But in another sense, global free-market capitalism conflicts with popular self-governance.

This is particularly true for the “neoliberal” variety of capitalism, which has been on the rise since the 1980s. It one-sidedly promotes the principles of global deregulation, liberalisation, privatisation, and the rollback of the welfare state — all of which increase inequality and redistribute economic and political power to corporations and wealthy individuals.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership

One of the most vivid recent examples of the conflict among democracy, sovereignty, and global capitalism is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — the so-called “free-trade” agreement among 12 states bordering the Pacific Ocean. They include the United States, Chile, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Japan, among others.

According to U.S. president Barack Obama, who strongly supports the agreement, “the TPP will boost our economies, lowering barriers to trade and investment, increasing exports, and creating more jobs for our people.”

In sharp contrast to the president’s enthusiastic endorsement, however, many critics view the TPP as deceptive and dangerous. Lori Wallach of Public Citizen has called the agreement a “Trojan horse” — a trap disguised as a gift, which will in reality serve the interests of few multinational corporations and the executive branch rather than the public at large.

First, let’s look at the process.

In democracy, binding rules gain legitimacy through a process of collective bargaining and compromise — a way of balancing power among all interest groups in a country. For that to happen, citizens and legislators need to know the content of the laws being discussed.

In the TPP, the opposite has been true. Very little detailed information has been made available to the public, or even to Congress, to enable them to discuss the pros and cons of the treaty. Much of what we do know has only emerged through leaks.

This level of secrecy has not always been the norm. As recently as the Bush era, agreements were treated with more transparency. For example, the governments involved in negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) — the proposed extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) throughout most of the western hemisphere — released drafts of the agreement, albeit with some portions withheld.

Not coincidentally, after civil society summits and massive protests conveyed widespread opposition, the parties ended their efforts to create the FTAA in 2004. In contrast, and despite its stated commitment to transparency in government, the Obama administration has thus far opposed revealing the TPP drafts.

While a small number of labour unions and NGOs appear to have some involvement in the process, critics note that many relevant actors have been shut out. As renowned economists Joseph Stiglitz and Dean Baker contend, it is mostly the executive branch and some privileged big corporations that are involved in the process, and are therefore able to shape the treaty to fit their narrow interests.

And the obstruction to public input may go even further. In the United States, Congress must approve any deal that the executive branch negotiates. However the Obama administration is seeking to have this done under “fast-track” trade authority, which will allow only limited time for debate and permit no amendments.

It’s not actually about trade

Contemporary trade agreements actually have very little to do with trade. Rather, the TPP will probably have its greatest impact on domestic regulations and standards. While the details remain unclear, countries will likely face increased pressure to roll back food safety rules, environmental standards, internet freedom, and even recently enacted financial regulations.

And what happens if a country refuses to comply? Private investors can sue governments if, for example, they believe that environmental regulations have reduced their projected profits — even if those regulations were democratically enacted and apply equally to all businesses in the country. These cases will be decided by unelected international tribunals that are not accountable to any nation’s citizens.

With all this in mind, it becomes apparent that so-called “free trade” agreements like the TPP are at serious odds with democracy and national sovereignty.

Dani Rodrik, former professor of international political economy at Harvard University, calls this inherent tension among democracy, national sovereignty, and radical economic globalisation the “globalization paradox.”

He contends that it is impossible to uphold these three elements simultaneously — only two can co-exist at the same time. He therefore argues that we must curb extreme economic liberalisation and deregulation (what he calls “hyper-globalisation”) in order to uphold democracy and sovereignty.

So far, that’s not the direction we’re heading in. As President Obama has said, “the TPP has the potential to be a model not only for the Asia Pacific but for future trade agreements.”

We already have 20 years of bad experience with NAFTA to go by. Meanwhile, Europe and the United States are currently negotiating the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA — also known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP), which has similar provisions.

So what will it be: Our right to control decisions that affect us? Or the rights of corporations and the executive branch to make secret decisions that undermine checks and balances? If we don’t make the choice, it will be made for us.

Morris Sanchez is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, where this article originally appeared.

Maize, Mexico’s main crop and staple food, faces threats like displacement by drug cultivation. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jan 22 2014 (IPS)

As the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passes its 20-year milestone, Mexico is seeing the displacement of traditional crops like maize by marihuana and opium poppy as a result of falling prices for the country’s most important agricultural product.

After NAFTA came into force between Canada, the United States and Mexico in January 1994, prices of maize and other agricultural products began to tumble, hurting the incomes of the smallest farmers who became the target of drug trafficking mafias.

“This has happened in regions where there are poor farmers, where prices have collapsed and productivity is low. They have to resort to drug traffickers for loans or to rent land,” said Víctor Quintana, an adviser to the Frente Democrático Campesino (Peasant’s Democratic Front) in the northern state of Chihuahua.

Quintana told IPS about the Pima native people who live in Chihuahua and the adjacent state of Sonora, who he says have become suppliers of raw materials to drug trafficking cartels engaged in violent disputes over distribution routes to the lucrative U.S. market.

“The process started in the 1980s, but has increased since 2006 with penetration by the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels,” he said about the battle between the two drug mafias for control of the border region.

Maize is especially symbolic in Mexico, regarded as its place of origin. With 59 native strains and 209 varieties, it is an essential part of the population’s diet.

Mexico produces 22 million tonnes of maize annually, but has to import a further 10 million tonnes to meet demand, according to the agriculture ministry and producers’ associations.

Some three million farmers grow maize on about eight million hectares. Two-thirds of them grow it for family consumption only.

Omar García Ponce, a researcher in the department of politics at the University of New York, told IPS that “the deteriorating economy in maize-growing municipalities (state subdivisions) is closely linked to the cultivation of drugs.”

In his view, declining income from maize farming is the reason why the country has become one of the foremost producers of marijuana and opium poppies.

García Ponce, Oeindrila Dube and Kevin Thom of the University of New York published a study in August 2013 titled “From Maize to Haze: Agricultural Shocks and the Growth of the Mexican Drug Sector,” which concludes that lower prices increased the planting of illegal crops in municipalities more climatically suited to growing maize.

The authors analysed data from more than 2,200 municipalities for the period 1990-2010 on production, agricultural employment and income. They also measured the impact of variations in maize prices on drug cultivation and pointed to the violent consequences of an expanding drug sector.

The study emphasises that NAFTA forced liberalisation of maize trade, expanding import quotas and reducing tariffs, as well as precipitating a huge fall in maize prices in Mexico.

Maize prices fell 59 percent between 1990 and 2005, leading to a 25 percent reduction in the incomes of maize farmers.

At the same time, drug-related killings increased by an average of 62 percent in maize suitable municipalities, the study says.

As a result of the 2007 global food crisis, maize prices increased by eight percent in the year to 2008, while drug-related homicides decreased by 12 percent in maize suitable municipalities.

Drug seizures rose by 16 percent and eradication of drug crops by eight percent, in contrast with non-maize growing areas.

Production of native maize in Mexico is also endangered by the threat of authorisation of commercial production of transgenic maize.

“[Lower] maize prices contributed to the burgeoning drug trade in Mexico,” says the study, the first to identify the role of rural income shocks in the development of drug trafficking in Mexico.

The study mapped areas of the states of Sinaloa, Guerrero, Michoacán, Chiapas, Oaxaca, Tamaulipas, Yucatán and Campeche, where there has been crop substitution. Drug crop eradication has been concentrated along the western and southern ranges of the Sierra Madre and adjacent coastal areas.

Ministry of defence (SEDENA) figures indicate that marijuana eradication increased between 1990 and 2003 from 5,400 to 34,000 hectares, respectively, declining afterward to 17,900 hectares in 2010.

Between December 2006 and November 2012, the six-year term served by conservative President Felipe Calderón, the armed forces destroyed 98,354 hectares, while in 2013, during the first year of conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto, 5,096 hectares were destroyed.

Opium poppy eradication began with 5,950 hectares in 1990, rose to 20,200 hectares in 2005 and fell to 15,331 hectares in 2010. Between December 2006 and November 2012 the armed forces destroyed 86,428 hectares.

In 2013, 14,419 hectares were eradicated.

The subject of illegal crops is taboo in maize-growing areas. Although rumours abound that farmers are growing drugs hidden among their fields, no one openly admits to having anything to do with it.

“You hear about a particular producer growing drugs, but people are afraid to talk about it,” farmers in the states of Jalisco and Guerrero told IPS on condition of anonymity for the sake of their safety.

Since 2011 the Mexican media and the attorney general’s office announced that at least two small farmers had been arrested for growing drugs in the central states of Puebla and Guerrero.

Peña Nieto announced a 26 billion dollar budget and “an extensive reform” for the country’s rural areas in 2014. But experts are doubtful whether these measures will change the situation of small farmers.

“If they concentrate on a handful of states and do not change the structure of resource distribution, things will remain the same in the rural areas, and in particular, with drug cultivation,” Quintana said.

On the other hand, “if idle lands are cultivated, if productivity is raised, and if technical support is provided for poor and indigenous small farmers, the problem could shrink,” said Quintana, who advocates a minimum guaranteed price for maize to counteract the dismantling of support for local production resulting from NAFTA.

García Ponce recommends “greater emphasis on helping the most vulnerable farmers. The situation in rural areas and the incentives that exist for farmers to turn to illegal crops have been ignored by public policies.”

The study also concluded that the fall in maize prices has resulted in an increase of five percentage points in the probability of a drug cartel appearing in a municipality.

NAFTA has become an engine of poverty in the country, forcing millions of Mexicans to migrate to the United States in search of jobs. Credit: Jim Winstead/cc by 2.0

By Manuel Pérez-Rocha
WASHINGTON, Dec 29 2013 (IPS)

Twenty years after it took effect, NAFTA has failed the vast majority of Mexicans.

Of course, hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs have vanished since automotive and tech companies moved their production across the border in search of much lower wages.NAFTA not only decimated many Mexican small businesses, it also helped to destroy entire national industries.

This was supposed to boost employment in Mexico. Instead, NAFTA has become an engine of poverty in the country, forcing millions of Mexicans to migrate to the United States in search of jobs.

Why? Under NAFTA, cheap subsidised corn from the United States flooded Mexico, making it impossible for millions of Mexican farmers to compete. Government support previously given to small farmers was withdrawn and directed to big agricultural exporting corporations instead.

“Before NAFTA, Mexico was a developing country,” says Victor Suarez, who leads an association of Mexican small farmers. “But now it’s an underdeveloping country, with 70 percent of people in rural areas and 85 percent of the indigenous population living in poverty.”

Still, even with hard times in the countryside, the trade deal’s architects promised that Mexico would industrialise. That transformation would, according to the promises that propelled NAFTA two decades ago, generate job growth.

Unfortunately, most factories that opened in Mexico are merely assembly plants, not production sites.

Parts arrive from the United States, China, and other countries. Once assembled, the products are exported. Without much local or national content, these industries require fewer workers than locally based manufacturing plants, which closed down when they could not compete.

Adán Rivera, who leads an association of small and medium-sized companies in Mexico, points out that because NAFTA caused “the destruction of thousands of small productive units,” it has resulted in “the elimination of millions of jobs.”

NAFTA not only decimated many Mexican small businesses, it also helped to destroy entire national industries. Before NAFTA, Mexico produced trains, tractors, and other industrial goods. They generally weren’t exported, but that production made the economy more self-sufficient.

Many of these industries have wasted away. During the 2008 financial crisis, Mexico’s economy shrank 6.6 percent — Latin America’s steepest decline — because of its chronic dependence on the U.S. market.

Meanwhile, Mexican consumption of U.S. goods has skyrocketed, with Mexicans shopping in big box stores like Walmart and Costco. At these stores, even food items emblematic of Mexico like tortilla chips and salsa are brought in from the United States.

The result? Millions of small-scale producers, mom and pop shops, and other traditional Mexican employers were scrapped, and the national diet went downhill. The gusher of processed foods and beverages from the North has made Mexico the world’s most obese nation, with diabetes its top cause of death.

Not everyone is a loser, of course. Mexico boasts the richest man in the world, Carlos Slim — who amassed his fortune from privatisation schemes related to NAFTA. Mexico’s economic elite, with its wealth securely deposited in banks in the United States and elsewhere, finds a lot to like in NAFTA.

But for the rest of the population, Mexico’s experience with NAFTA shows why free trade and investment deals are bad not only for America’s working families, but for working families all over the world.

That’s why the wide-ranging Trans-Pacific Partnership President Barack Obama is now championing faces growing global resistance. After 20 years of NAFTA, the predictions we made that the agreement would cause massive social problems have proven true. It’s become clear that these pacts can hurt people in every possible way.

Manuel Pérez-Rocha is an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow. This article originally appeared on Other Words.