2018 Spring Farm

Page 14 March 22, 2018 2018 Logan County Farm Outlook Magazine LINCOLN DAILY NEWS for its products, including agricultural products. The purchase of corn and soybeans from the United States resulted in the drop of agricultural production and Ag jobs in Mexico. Thus, Mexican farm workers continued to cross the borders in order to find work, perhaps more so than before NAFTA. Prior to NAFTA, the United States and Canada had a two-party trade agreement, so there was speculation that NAFTA would not do anything to improve trade between those two countries. However, the results belied speculation. After NAFTA, Canada to U.S. export dollars rose from $110 billion to $346 billion annually, and U.S. to Canada exports rose at about the same amount. What NAFTA was supposed to do for Canada though hasn’t exactly worked out. The goal had been to increase the productivity gap between the two countries and increase jobs for Canadian’s. However, Canada’s productivity rate remains at 72 percent of the United States. The NAFTA may have had the greatest impact on the U.S. economy, with an estimated increase in exports by about $80 billion per year. It also produced more export related jobs, approximately 200,000, and an increase in the average pay levels of these jobs. However, the downside to the NAFTA agreement was the absence of tariffs and taxes that made it easier for U.S. manufacturers to relocate to Mexico where labor was cheaper, thus making the profits for those individual companies higher, without incurring any cost for returning goods back to the U.S. for distribution. The biggest down side to this is that now, U.S. blue collar workers are losing jobs to Mexico, and the country is becoming lopsided with the best employment opportunities to those with higher-education; those without education are becoming a big portion of the nation’s unemployment statistics. In the article McBride and Sergie state, “The U.S.-Mexico trade balance swung from a $1.7 billion U.S. surplus in 1993 to a $54 billion deficit by 2014. Economists like the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s (CEPR) Dean Baker and the Economic Policy Institute argue that this surge of imports caused the loss of up to 600,000 U.S. jobs over two decades, though they admit that some of this import growth would likely have happened even without NAFTA.” From January to the first portion of March 2018, NAFTA seemed to be a hot topic in Washington, with explosive tweets from the President that he would imposes taxes on cars if Mexico put tariffs on steel and aluminum. The President has even threatened to dissolve NAFTA altogether. But House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady says that is not going to happen. On March 6th Brady said that there was good progress being made on NAFTA, and that the United States would not “scrap NAFTA.” Continue 8