I am writing this to express my disappointment that Al Gore continues to support NAFTA now that so much hard evidence points to it's negative eco-effects. His position on NAFTA undermines what seems to be a very earnest dedication to protecting the environment. This diary is strictly about the
environmental effects of NAFTA. Here's a noxious taste of what I found after a few hours research. This first entry is an early overview; this data includes the 9 years prior and five years since NAFTA began in 1994, an overview with hard numbers.
Ideally things should have improved noticeably in the later years of this study however that isn't what the author's research found.
...Statistics from Mexico's National Institute for Statistics, Geography, and Information Systems (INEGI) document how environmental degradation has
overwhelmed any benefits from trade-led economic growth...according to INEGI, major environmental problems have worsened since trade liberalization began in Mexico.... national levels of soil erosion, municipal solid waste, and urban air and water pollution all worsened from 1985 to 1999. Rural soil erosion grew by 89%, municipal solid waste by 108%, water pollution by 29%, and urban air pollution by 97%....The INEGI studies estimate the financial costs of this environmental degradation at10% of GDP from 1988 to 1999, an average of $36 billion of damage each year ($47 billion for 1999)...
Kevin P. Gallagher, research associate at the Global Development and Environment Institute at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Tufts University, author: Free Trade and the Environment: Mexico, NAFTA, and Beyond (Stanford University Press) http://ase.tufts.edu/....
Next, some excerpts from a report by Public Citizen describing some of the results of NAFTA after its first 3 years:
http://www.citizen.org/...
Public Citizen and its colleague Mexican citizen group, RMALC, have thoroughly documented the deterioration of U.S.-Mexico border environmental and health conditions under NAFTA in a January 1996 study. Conditions have deteriorated under NAFTA as documented by specific, objective measures such as water quality, incidence of environment-related disease, toxic waste production and dumping rates.
On both sides of the border from Texas to California, tuberculosis and hepatitis rates have continued to soar since NAFTA. Near Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Mexico, scores of babies have been born with deadly anencephaly, a defect resulting in an exposed or missing brain. Several new clusters of this tragic disease have started since NAFTA, including at Eagle Pass, Texas-Piedras Negras, Mexico.The world's highest rate of Lupus occurs in the Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora border area. Here factories producing and using toxic chemicals and solvents and using unhealthy operations, such as lead smelters and glass factories that burn old tires as fuel, operate without environmental rules. Since NAFTA went into effect, rather than leaving the area, at least 150 new plants have opened. The Lupus rate in Nogales has continued to grow since NAFTA.
Between 1993 and 1995, imports of fresh and frozen fruits from Mexico increased 45.2%; vegetables rose 31.4%. In May 1997, the Government Accounting Office[GAO] released a study of efforts by the U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service [APHIS] to minimize the risks to agriculture from pests and diseases entering the United States.Specifically, the GAO reported that: fewer than 1 percent of the 3.3 million trucks entering the U.S. each year are inspected, at "the Mexican border crossing with the heaviest passenger vehicle volume in the country, a supervisory inspector said the staff were inspecting less than 0.1 percent of the passenger vehicular traffic because of the high volume of traffic," at most of the ports studied, the APHIS inspection program could not keep up with the increasing demands. Due to heavy workloads, APHIS inspectors do not conduct complete inspections, allowing possibly unsafe products into the U.S., and "Because of staffing shortages, one work unit along the U.S.-Mexican border can provide inspector coverage of a busy pedestrian crossing for only 8 out of the 18 hours of port operations." NAFTA importers "have put pressure on APHIS to carry out its increased inspection responsibilities more quickly..."
The inspection system's failure allows a greatly increased amount of produce contaminated with illegal pesticides to enter the United States from Mexico. Mexico has had a troubling record of violations of U.S. pesticide residue tolerances. A study by the non-government Environmental Working Group analyzed 14,923 computerized records from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration [FDA] routine pesticide monitoring program for 1992-1993. It focused on 42 fruits and vegetables that comprise 96 and 83 percent of domestic fruit and vegetable consumption, respectively. EWG found that: Imported crops from Mexico contained very high rates of illegal pesticides. Strawberries, head lettuce and carrots have violation rates of 18.4%, 15.6% and 12.3%, respectively; and
Illegal pesticides were underreported by FDA on crops from Mexico. The FDA publicly reports that 4 percent of crop imports from Mexico contained illegal pesticides; its internal records indicate that the rate was actually 7.4 percent. Worse, the FDA-reported rate for strawberries was 10%; EWG found the actual rate to be 19%.
The stats in the last graph are for the 2 years prior to NAFTA. Do you think with more trucks coming in and more pressure on the inspectors the situation has improved or worsened?
NAFTA has placed similar downward pressure on U.S. highway safety. Truck traffic from Mexico has increased dramatically due to the boom in imports from Mexico. Two years after NAFTA's passage, more than a quarter of the approximately 5,000 Mexican trucks that crossed into Texas each day carried corrosives, chemicals, explosives, jet fuel, poisons, toxic waste and pesticides.
Prior to it's enactment, pro-NAFTA forces talked alot about it's monitoring and oversight abilities. Let's see how that worked out. Here's a press release from the Environmental Defense Organization from June 2000, 6 years after NAFTA began: http://www.environmentaldefense.org/...
...After the signing of the environmental side agreement, Administration officials claimed that NAFTA would lead to cleanup of serious environmental problems along the U.S.-Mexico border and improved environmental protection. In all three countries, NAFTA supporters promised NAFTA would eliminate the incentive for factories to locate in the Mexican border free trade zone where 2000 companies have crowded without adequate facilities for treating toxic chemicals or residential sewage. Instead, the work force of the maquila sector{light assembly} is up 60% in NAFTA's first three and one half years. Yet, none of the public health and toxic waste problems that predated NAFTA have been significantly remedied, much less new environmental protection or enforcement undertaken.
Here's a synopsis after the first 10 years from a policy appraisal by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, entitled "Time for the NAFTA Environmental Watchdog to Get Some Teeth"http://www.globalpolicy.org/...
June 24, 2003...Ten years into NAFTA, urban air quality in Mexico remains a leading cause of respiratory illness. Ignoring commitments to liberalize farming, U.S. agricultural subsidies- to the tune of $21,000 per farmer per year- damage the environment through millions of tons of chemical runoff fouling lakes and rivers, while putting developing country farmers at a gross disadvantage. Not one single environmental problem that existed a decade ago has been solved, while pressures hardly on the radar screen during the NAFTA debates- from climate change to the effects of pesticides on children's health - pose new threats....
NAFTA works it's wonders in many ways. Monsanto produces Roundup (glyphosate), a noxious herbicide. It then develops a strain of genetically altered corn that can be sprayed with Roundup and not be wiped out like the surrounding weeds. I hate to pull weeds too, but this seems insane, the world's corn supplies are being degraded in the process:
http://www.greenpeace.org/...
In September 2001 the Mexican government announced that scientists had discovered contamination of indigenous varieties of maize with genetically engineered (GE) varieties. The likely source of the contamination is imported maize from the US.
The contamination was found in 15 out of 22 communities in the state of Oaxaca in Mexico, one of the world's centres of origin and diversity of maize. Indigenous and local communities in Oaxaca were horrified, and non-governmental environmental organizations in Mexico started a campaign to bring the contamination to the attention of the world.
One of the first things they did was to request the environmental body of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the NAFTA Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), to look into the matter. The CEC began a process to investigate the contamination; possible impacts on human health, communities, and the environment; and eventually to provide recommendations to the three NAFTA governments on how to address the contamination.
The CEC established an advisory group to develop recommendations for the governments. It also commissioned a series of studies to provide more information on which to make recommendations. The studies were presented to the public during a meeting in Oaxaca, Mexico in March 2004. The public spoke back - indigenous groups, local communities, and environmental organizations in Oaxaca presented the CEC with a manifesto "Defend our maize, guard our life," declaring "in our territories there will be no transgenics."
There are hundreds of local and wild varieties of Mexican maize. Loss of these varieties puts the world's food security at risk since farmers around the world rely on these genetic resources to create new varieties adapted to changing environmental conditions.
Better living through chemistry? Mother Jones printed this about glyphosate back in 1997:
http://www.motherjones.com/...
...studies show glyphosate, which has been described by the Environmental Defense Fund and by Vice President Al Gore as safer than other herbicides, is not as benign as it is billed. Glyphosate is less toxic than many other herbicides, but it's still the third most commonly reported cause of illness among agricultural workers in California. For landscape maintenance workers, it ranks highest. And, according to the Journal of Pesticide Reform, the herbicide also damages the ability of bacteria to transform nitrogen into a usable form for plants, and it harms fungi that help plants absorb water and nutrients. Residues of the herbicide have been found in lettuce, carrots, and barley that were planted a year after the soil was sprayed.
Last - and possibly the most outrageous, least publicized, creepy aspect of NAFTA: it establishes a corporation's right to profit as sacred, superceding a nation's right to establish and enforce it's own laws and regulations. Here's an explanation from the Sierra Club's website and how it impacts the environment: http://www.sierraclub.org/...
One of the most controversial parts of NAFTA is the section outlining investor rights. These rights give broad privileges to transnational corporations at the expense of environmental and other public interest protections. Under these investment provisions, companies can bypass domestic courts and sue a government directly for cash compensation if they think an environmental or public health law might interfere with their ability to profit. Through this so-called investor-to-state mechanism, companies are not required to first bring their claims forth in domestic courts; instead, the NAFTA suits are arbitrated in international tribunals that operate outside a nation's regular legal system and are extremely limited in regard to public participation and observation.
These sweeping investor rights have already had a harmful effect on the environment. After more than ten years of NAFTA it is clear that the Chapter 11 provisions favor corporate profits over environmental protections and undermine the very basis of our democracy. Both Mexico and Canada have already lost cases under Chapter 11 and there are currently over one billion dollars worth of Chapter 11 environmental suits pending.
Our domestic environmental safeguards are subject to lawsuits and decisions determined by an international tribunal. Hard to believe? Here are some examples:
Metalclad v. Mexico - In October 1996, Metalclad Corporation, a U.S. waste-disposal company, accused the Mexican government of violating Chapter 11 when the state of San Luis Potosi refused to grant the company permission to re-open a waste disposal facility. The Mexican State Governor shut down the site after a geological audit showed the facility would contaminate the local water supply. The Governor then declared the site part of a 600,000-acre ecological zone. Metalclad claimed this constituted an act of expropriation and sought $90 million in compensation to the company. The NAFTA tribunal ruled in favor of Metalclad, ordering the Mexican government to pay $16.7 million in compensation to the company.
S.D. Myers v. Canada In 1995, Canada stopped allowing the export of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), from Canada to the U.S. Exporting PCB could violate Canada's obligation under the Basel Convention, a multinational environmental agreement governing trade in toxic waste. PCBs were used as coolants and lubricants in electrical equipment. In 1977 PCBs were banned for production in the U.S. because of evidence that they built up in the environment and caused harmful health effects. In 1998 S.D. Myers, a leading American waste treatment company, sued Canada under NAFTA's investment rules for monetary compensation for the 16-month duration of the ban. The NAFTA tribunal ruled in favor of S.D. Myers, ordering the Canadian government to pay over $8 million in compensation to the company.
Glamis v. United States After California placed cleanup requirements for highly controversial mining operations that would harm the environment and destroy sacred Native American sites, Glamis, a Canadian gold mining company, sued the U.S. under Chapter 11. Glamis claims that the California laws and regulations will destroy their profit margin. Glamis is seeking a total of $50 million in compensation ($15 million from actual investment and $35 million in compensation for "lost profits") from the U.S. government.(ON GOING)
In the next case Methanex eventually lost the case after costing US taxpayers millions of dollars to defend our environmental standards.
Methanex v. California In 1999, California decided to phase out MTBE, a gasoline additive believed by the World Health Organization to be carcinogenic. MTBE has seeped into groundwater supplies of hundreds of communities throughout California, making the water undrinkable. The ban took effect on January 1, 2004. The Canadian corporation Methanex, which manufactures one of the components of MTBE, has brought a $970 million suit under NAFTA's Chapter 11 against the U.S. Methanex demands compensation for profits and business opportunities it claims to have lost because of the environmentally based ban.
Those companies that are complaining about border inspection delays could sue because the inspections are costing them money by slowing down their trade. Monsanto could sue if a govenment decided spraying Round-up on thousands of acres of genetically altered corn isn't so clever after all. There was so much outrage earlier this year about a foreign company controling some American ports. NAFTA cedes control over so much more of American life than that but few people know it.
CONCLUSION: Increased agro-chemical runoff, lowered water quality; increased incidence of environment-related disease, toxic waste production and dumping rates; promoting genetically engineered foods and dangerous herbicides; lawsuits that favor profits over eco-security... the more I read about NAFTA, the more illogical it becomes for any environmentalist, including Al Gore, to support it. Unfortunately the corporate -"free" trade movement is spreading and the NAFTA model is undermining more parts of the globe.