DURHAM — Mexican farmers, Canadian health care workers and American auto technicians are losing their jobs because NAFTA puts corporate rights ahead of democracy, according to speakers at a recent UNH lecture.
The discussion on the "harmful effects" of the North American Free Trade Agreement brought speakers from Mexico, Canada and the United States to the University of New Hampshire on Tuesday.
The guest lecturers railed against an agreement that, they say, is costing jobs and possibly lives. About 40 people, mostly students, made up the audience in the Memorial Union Building’s Theater 2.
"For us, war and NAFTA are two sides of the same point," Emilio Lopez said through a translator. "There are children dying in Iraq and in Mexico of hunger."
Lopez, the communications secretary from a farmers’ rights group and a college sociology professor, said 40,000 children per year are dying in Mexico.
NAFTA is a trade agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico that gives broad powers to corporations to pursue business interests. When it was adopted in 1994, it was heralded as an economy-boosting fair trade alliance.
Critics such as MIT professor Noam Chomsky say it is designed to suppress workers’ rights.
According to Lopez, NAFTA has seriously altered the corn industry in Mexico by radically increasing the amount of corn exported from the United States to Mexico, which in turn, is putting farmers out of business.
More than 6 million tons of corn were imported from the United States last year, up from about 400,000 tons in the year before NAFTA, according to Lopez.
Lopez, Donalda MacDonald, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, and Tara Colon, a representative of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union of Philadelphia, visited the campus through a project sponsored by the Student Environmental Action Coalition and the American Friends Service Committee.
The local lecture was part of an international tour opposed to NAFTA and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas. The tour was organized by Global Exchange, a non-profit human rights group based in San Francisco.
MacDonald’s union is the largest in Canada and represents one out of 60 Canadians, she said. Listing the ill effects of NAFTA on her country, MacDonald said NAFTA has allowed multinational corporations to threaten the Canadian health care system.
"Free trade agreements seriously threaten our world," MacDonald said, noting that as many as 5,000 health care workers in British Columbia could be laid off in a move to privatize that industry.
According to MacDonald, "the state mechanism cedes power to sue government to foreign corporations," under NAFTA, but citizens and domestic governments are not given the same right to take on corporations.
MacDonald called the FTAA, which would essentially extend the terms of NAFTA to most of the Western Hemisphere, "NAFTA on steroids."
Colon is a member of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union which promotes the rights of the poor and homeless. Colon was a homeless mother at the age of 19.
She said the effects of NAFTA can be seen on the streets of the United States when poor people go without health care because, she said, NAFTA has increased its cost.
"We are all affected by not having economic human rights in this country," Colon said. "We are living in the belly of the beast. Our government and our corporations dominate the economy across the world."
Arnie Alpert, program coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee, urged audience members to educate themselves about NAFTA issues because, he said, most politicians do not know its true effects.
"I am convinced that people on town councils and state legislators have no idea what these free trade agreements are all about," Alpert said.
Democrat Staff Writer Brian DeKoning can be reached at 742-4455, Ext. 5043 or bdekoning@fosters.com
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