Mexican Legislators Fear Unrest over NAFTA

Dec 25, 2007

MEXICO.— Hector Padilla, president of the agriculture committee of the Mexican House of Representatives, said that when the agricultural chapter of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) comes into effect January 1 it will lead to social unrest.

Padilla said the scheduled removal of tariffs on the import of food products from the United States and Canada on January 1, 2008 will provoke a major crisis in the Mexican countryside.

The impact will be enormous and disastrous for Mexico’s economy because the policy will destroy the institutional tools that gave strength to agriculture, said Padilla.

The legislator explained that a worsening of the crisis in the farm sector would include a drop in production and supply, seriously impacting the rest of society.

Padilla stressed that the elimination of tariffs on imported corn, beans, milk and sugar along with flooding the Mexican market with those products from the North, will cause a great crisis in prices and further increase the exodus of Mexicans towards the US.

The survival of 90 percent of the rural producers of Mexico who produce these crops is at stake, he said.

Another legislator, Victor Quintana, from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) also spoke out against NAFTA and its negative affect on the rural Mexican economy.

Quintana announced that on January 1 a protest to denounce the damage caused to Mexican farmers by the NAFTA treaty will take place on the Cordoba Bridge that unites Mexico and the US at the Ciudad Juarez-El Paso border. (PL)

http://www.periodico26.cu/english/news_ ... 122407.htm