NAFTA has provided huge benefits to Mexican farmers, so it is really hard to understand their protests. From NY Times:
Last week, tens of thousands of poor Mexican farmers marched down Mexico City’s fancy Paseo de la Reforma demanding that Nafta be reversed, their cows and donkeys occasionally taking a nibble from the grass along the median strip.
...Nafta has already shaken up Mexican farming — mostly for the better. The value of agricultural imports from the United States has doubled since 1994, when tariffs started to gradually decline. Imports of corn have more than doubled by volume.
But this isn’t displacing Mexico’s small-scale farmers. Most corn from the United States is used for feed and doesn’t compete with white corn farmed in Mexico. Mexican corn production is about a third higher than before Nafta came into effect. And cheap American corn is providing cheap feed to Mexico’s livestock farmers.
NAFTA helped lift many Mexican workers out of poverty by rescinding many protectionist government interventions. If I am not mistaken, this included reducing price supports for the agriculture sector and allowing imports of agricultural products (way ahead of the US). In Mexico, this has meant a shrinking Ag. sector and a decline in the derived demand for Ag. labor. Hence the protests.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, it has also reduced the return to physical labor and led to huge increases in female labor force participation. In this regard, they appear to be following the path of many western economies (a bit behind the US).