American Farmers in California's Central Valley (San Joaquin) have air quality standards that they must meet. Fresno County and Tulare Counties EACH produce more ag goods than 41 states. Check the Ag stats. Mexico doesn't really have any environmental standards. Look at the water pollution coming into CA from Mexicali.

 

One of the lovely features of NAFTA is that you may not apply more stringent standards than are applied in the home country.
Our trucks have to meet safety and emission standards to operate on our highways. NAFTA allows the Mexican trucks to be exempt from our standards even though they're on our roads.

 

Not just safety, but also appearance. Unless an over-the-road-tractor/trailer has just emerged from a storm or is going into one, the DOT will cite him for a dirty vehicle, one of the numerous 'important' compliance issues that that make us so competitive.

An interresting thought is now that NAFTA member nations are using their own transportation that will surely displace a significant number of our required vehicles as our domestic industrial and agricultural commerce diminishes will that cause a reduction in the 60,000 member DOT federal workforce? Hahahahaha.

 

Well, one unintended consequence is that NAFTA has been good for the health care industry. Remember all the hepatitis and E. coli and/or salmonella outbreaks that were traced to foods imported from south of the border? Let's see, there were the contaminated green onions and strawberries lately, but I could be missing others. And, I'm sure there will be more to come as we get more food from our neighbors to the south.

 

It really should be renamed SHAFTA. It doesn't benefit the North.

 

When NAFTA was conceived in the late 1970s to consolidate and streamline existing trade agreements it was primarily a vehicle to allow free trade between nations with common or convenient borders. More of a convenience for existing trade than anything else. The US was still the world's big industrial gun and saw it as convenience, not competition. By the time it was signed into law, 1992, we were in the dot.com bubble economy and few people not involved in business viewed it as anything but the possibility of less expensive products on the shelves, a boon for our consumer society.

By 2000, our economic problems, a high standard of living that produced products which couldn't compete against those produced almost anywhere else in the world, came home to roost. At that point US jobs were being lost forever by the millions, with no end in sight.

Now we've made it very popular to shun illegal immigrants 'taking American jobs' (even though they were welcomed for 50-years prior to that to perform tasks Americans considered beneath them) . Along with that came public condemnation of NAFTA for the very same reasons.

We've done a rather complete job of stripping out our natural resources to satisfy our requirement of having one of the world's highest standards of living and the largest consuming country on the planet, and now we're paying the price.

Mexico and South American countries have cheap land and labor. They'll become our food sources, especially when our farmers are selling their water to facilitate growth in our cities. Unless, of course, you want to eventually pay ten bucks for that head of lettuce because the picker is covered under a US minimum wage law that also fines the employer for not providing health insurance and requires workplace standards on a par with hospitals.

Canada has the natural resources and food we require, and will continue to supply them as long as demand exists. A small example of Canada's edge on lumber is workman's compensation. Canadian workers are covered by a national health program and last I heard, US workman's comp premiums on a logger was exceeding their hourly rate of pay and sawmills weren't far behind. If you're a US lumber supplier, a monkey could put the pencil to that and buy Canadian.

We've lived very high and there's always a price for that. Now we're this big organism with countries around us providing our required substances. Futurists have long held that this continent should be one entity for purposes of survival from over-population, so look at it like we're taking the initial steps for eventual consolidation.