From NAFTA to KORUSFTA

Excerpts:

"Trade representatives from the United States and South Korea are racing against the clock to sign the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement under the "fast track" deadline.

Given the effects of NAFTA on America's manufacturing workers and Mexico's farmers, free traders can no longer simply tout the miracles of neoliberal economics. According to the Economic Policy Institute, since NAFTA took effect, over 1 million workers in the U.S. lost their high-paying manufacturing jobs, and were forced to take lower-paying service jobs where they now earn 23 percent less. U.S. workers without a college education - 73 percent of the population - saw their wages drop by 13 percent since NAFTA took effect.

But NAFTA's impact is even more apparent in Mexico where real wages dropped by 80 percent and unemployment rose from nine to 15 percent. Approximately 1.5 million Mexican farmers were forced to give up farming because they were unable to meet the price of corn produced by massively-subsidized U.S. agribusinesses."

And get this:

"From 1995 to 2005, the U.S. rice industry received over $10.5 billion dollars in government subsidies, and the lion's share - 25 percent - went to the top one percent of rice growers. In the U.S., the average rice farm is 397 acres, compared with South Korea's average rice farm of 3.5 acres. Approximately 8,000 of America's two million farms grow rice, compared with South Korea, where over 787,000 farms - or 57 percent - cultivate rice."

Globalization and free trade make for beautiful economic theory and end up tearing apart the lives of the victims of government policy makers.

Original: http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/020807LA.shtml