WASHINGTON, D.C. – The fifth round of secret negotiations on a new North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) kicks off today in Mexico. A central topic of discussion among negotiators from Canada, Mexico, and the United States will be farm policy.
As NAFTA negotiations continue, Bill Waren, senior trade analyst at Friends of the Earth, has released a new analysis focused on trade implications for agriculture and food policy.
Additionally, Bill Waren issued the following statement:
Environmentalists and family farm advocates in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are sounding the alarm about the potential threat to sustainable family farms and the planet of a new NAFTA, negotiated in secret and written to the specifications of multinational agribusiness giants.
NAFTA has entrenched the worst impacts of chemical-intensive industrial agriculture, controlled by an increasingly consolidated and more powerful set of corporations. Trump’s rewrite of NAFTA is likely to compound the harms of this system imposed on family farmers, workers, consumers, animal welfare and the environment. If Trump and these mega-corporations get their way, we can expect decreased regulation to lead to greater harms to our health from pesticides and unsafe food and further depletion and degradation of North America’s soil, water, climate and biodiversity.
We need to abandon the current approach to trade policy and agriculture that puts the bottom lines of corporations like Monsanto ahead of the public interest. Instead, we must support trade deals that put the well-being of family farmers, food chain workers, consumers, rural communities, animals and the environment first.
For more information, please see this Friends of the Earth publication: 7 ways Trump’s NAFTA threatens family farmers, animal welfare, our health and the environment.
Expert contact: Bill Waren, (202) 222-0746, [email protected]
Communications contact: Erin Jensen, (202) 222-0722, [email protected]