To Trade or Not to Trade: NAFTA and the Prospects for Free Trade in the Americas

January 1, 2004 marked the 10th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). A decade after this landmark trade agreement was signed by the United States, Canada and Mexico, there was considerable debate whether it had been good for the countries that signed it. U.S. President George W. Bush said that NAFTA had “created jobs and lifted lives,” but Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry insisted that the treaty needed to be “fixed and adjusted.” Critics of NAFTA in the United States claimed that it had caused a loss of 750,000 manufacturing jobs to Mexico, lowered U.S. wage levels, undercut American environmental laws and caused a “tremendous collapse” in Canada's social welfare infrastructure. Neither were all Mexicans in agreement with President Vicente Fox, who claimed that NAFTA “has been successful for Mexico.” A poll conducted in Mexico City found that 44 percent of adults disapproved of NAFTA and that 83 percent felt that the United States had benefited the most from it. Tens of thousands of Mexican farmers thronged the streets of the capital in early 2003 to demand a review of the agricultural provisions in NAFTA…