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 Editorials | At Issue | July 2006 
NAFTA's Future Could be Riding on Mexican Vote
 Alan Freeman - theglobeandmail.Com
When Mexico's 71.7 million registered voters go to the polls tomorrow, they will be deciding not only on their president for the next six years but perhaps on the direction of the North American free-trade agreement.
The election results may also lead to a cooling of the warm relations that have developed between Mexico City and Ottawa since Vicente Fox became President in 2000, breaking the 71-year monopoly on power held by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
The 12-year-old trade pact, which links Mexico with the United States and Canada, has become a central target of the campaign of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the populist former mayor of Mexico City who has held a slim but shaky lead in public-opinion polls in the final days of a gruelling election campaign.
The left-leaning Mr. Lopez Obrador, a self-described standard-bearer for Mexico's poor and downtrodden, has vowed to renegotiate the trade pact to stop what the country's peasants fear will be a flood of cheap U.S.-grown corn and beans on Jan. 1, 2008.
That's when Mexico is to lift all remaining quotas and tariffs on corn and beans, which are staples of the Mexican diet and the dominant crop for millions of the country's peasant farmers.
"We are going to protect our domestic producers," Mr. Lopez Obrador told his closing campaign rally on Wednesday in the centre of Mexico City, getting a huge ovation from tens of thousands of supporters.
He vowed to renegotiate the trade accord to stop an influx of U.S.-grown corn and to reinstitute guaranteed prices, subsidies and loans for farmers, which may break NAFTA rules.
"Corn is the most important crop in Mexico," said Anna de Ita, head of research at the Centro de Estudios para el Cambio en el Campo Mexicano, a rural studies institute in Mexico City.
"Three and a half million Mexican farmers live off corn and 80 per cent of them have less than five hectares of land."
Ms. de Ita said that Mexican peasants will never be able to compete with low-cost U.S. corn production, which she says is subsidized.
The U.S. government has already made it clear that it has no intention of considering any changes to NAFTA. "We have no interest in renegotiating any parts of the agreement," U.S. agriculture undersecretary J. B. Penn said this month after the Mexican Agriculture Minister asked Washington and Ottawa to reconsider the 2008 market opening.
Mr. Fox has warned against reopening NAFTA, saying it would be an "error" to try to modify it. In an interview published this week, the departing President insisted NAFTA had been "very positive" for Mexico's economy.
"Only a blind man or a myopic can deny it," he said.
Although Felipe Calderon, the presidential candidate of Mr. Fox's PAN party, is expected to maintain his trade and foreign-policy stand, there are concerns that under Mr. Lopez Obrador, relations with Canada could become more distant because of the ideological divide between the leftist Mr. Lopez Obrador and Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
"Canada-Mexican relations have gone great guns for the past six years," said Duncan Wood, director of Canadian Studies at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico, noting that Mr. Fox saw eye to eye with former Liberal prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin not only on NAFTA but on opposition to the invasion of Iraq and United Nations reform, and on a range of foreign-policy goals.
Mr. Wood said: "The danger from the Canadian side is that Harper is more interested in working closely with the Americans [than were the Liberals]."
As for Mr. Lopez Obrador, he has expressed little interest in foreign policy, saying that domestic policy should come first.
"Lopez Obrador is a big unknown," Mr. Wood continued. "And if he's focused on foreign policy, it will likely be Latin America."
When it comes to Mr. Lopez Obrador's intention to defy NAFTA, Mr. Wood thinks he will quickly realize that he has little manoeuvring room.
"This is very much political grandstanding. Lopez Obrador is a pragmatist but he has some populist tendencies. It's good to pick a fight with the Americans for domestic political consumption." |
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