New NAFTA apparently limps to the finish line

To be clear, New NAFTA, aka the U.S., Mexico, Canada Trade Agreement, regarding which a deal was announced yesterday, does have some improvements over the existing one.  According to the text it does, anyway. Whether, for example, new environmental and labor protections will be enforced remains to be seen.

But in other ways it’s not really any better at all. The content of this blog often reflects my interest in farm issues, and that’s where I’m going, here:

But what exactly is the win for farmers in the new USMCA? Nearly all tariffs for agriculture were removed under the original NAFTA. The International Trade Commission, which analyzes trade deals for Congress, projected that the USMCA would result in a slight net deficit for agriculture trade: meaning we would import slightly more than export. The small projected increase in agriculture exports – mostly dairy to Canada – would have no substantive effect on the ongoing, dramatic loss of small and mid-sized dairies in the Midwest.

Grading trade deals solely on the value of goods crossing the border has always obscured the real winners and losers. The original NAFTA, combined with the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the 1996 Farm Bill, led to the ramping up of agricultural production and an increase in agriculture exports. It also led to an almost immediate drop in commodity crop prices and farmer income. In fact, since the original NAFTA we’ve seen the steady consolidation of agribusiness firms and of farmland ownership, the loss of hundreds of thousands of small and mid-sized farms and independent ranches, and the rapid growth of large-scale concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) fueled by cheap (often below cost) feed. We now have a largely integrated North American agriculture market, where young cattle from Mexico and feeder pigs from Canada routinely cross borders to be finished here. For agriculture, NAFTA’s real winners were not countries, but global agribusiness firms like Cargill, JBS, Tyson and Smithfield that operate in all three countries. - IATP

As far as the politics goes, this isn’t going to be huge for the 2020 election. Nothing else has changed the fact that half of American adults (that is, almost twice the percentage that actually voted for him, in 2016) - including 60% of women - want Trump gone, like, yesterday, whatever it takes, and this won’t, either. We just rightfully loathe and despise the guy, as the utterly repugnant, despicable failure as a human being that he is. But I’m adding this as a politics junkie thing.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), an adviser to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), said a deal that the AFL-CIO's endorsed "could be problematic," but vowed to reserve judgement until senators got a presentation on the agreement. "I just hope he hasn't gone too far in Speaker Pelosi's direction, and the AFL-CIO's direction that he might lose some support here," he said. "My concern is that what the administration presented has now been moved demonstrably to Democrats, the direction that they wanted." - The Hill