NAFTA Kicked Up A Notch

…Instead, the SPP has three fundamental objectives. The Bush administration wants to create more advantageous conditions for transnational corporations and remove remaining barriers to the flow of capital and crossborder production within the framework of NAFTA. It wants to secure access to natural resources in the other two countries, especially oil. And it wants to create a regional security plan based on “pushing its borders out” into a security perimeter that includes Mexico and Canada.

On the liberalization side, the SPP has focused on simplifying procedures for doing business and creating more unified norms and standards. The SPP seeks to make it easier for U.S. companies to ship production offshore, eliminate specific Canadian and Mexican labor and environmental standards in the interest of “harmonization”, and assure that harsher security measures don’t interfere with crossborder business.


For Mexico, the harmonization process — like NAFTA before it — does not take into account its less-developed status or the pressing social needs of its people that could mandate special protections or safeguards. Many of the priorities of the SPP benefit only a small handful of powerful actors, such as greater patent protection (Mexico holds very few patents) and joint anti-piracy campaigns (piracy is a major employer in Mexico and benefits low-income consumers).

In negotiations between equal partners concerned with public well-being, very different issues would be on the table. The discourse of “three great nations united in a common cause” falls apart when compared to the actual content of the agreements and shows instead two great nations subordinated to the powerful interests of the United States. Equal partners would operate in the global market as a bloc with common interests. But the three countries don’t act as a bloc in multilateral forums like the World Trade Organization and the numerous trade disputes that have arisen among them, as well as the way they compete for foreign markets, attest to their separate national agendas.

ZNet