Looks like I goofed up. I was asked the following in an email earlier today:
It's a good question. The relevant portion of my response:
I probably sound like a fool, but I can't find the source either. The reason is that there isn't one - I'm afraid you caught a serious error on my part that made its way into the paper. I'm deeply sorry for this, and would be willing to write a letter to the Texan correcting myself if I hadn't sent that to them so long ago. It was an honest but unfortunate mistake, although I feel pretty stupid now that you've pointed this out. I'm usually pretty good about getting my facts straight.
If you're curious, the letter I wrote borrows from a much longer piece I wrote in May 2006, when immigration demonstrations were heating up across the country, and I felt it was important to write a piece dissecting the immigration proposals before congress. (Actually, I felt obligated to help fight all this racist legislation, but that's another matter.) In my original piece, I wrote that:
When NAFTA was passed in 1994, for instance, six million Mexican farmers were forced out of work because they couldn't compete with government-subsidized corn and wheat from the United States and Canada. And in 2008, as many as two million more farmers will be ruined by the full opening of Mexico's borders to U.S. exports of corn, beans, and powdered milk, the last products to be liberalized under NAFTA.
This essay appeared in a radical news magazine I edited for a while, called Turning the Tide. This publication is now defunct, but you can find the essay on another website I run called the New Texas Radical at: http://www.newtexasradical.org/content/view/20/30/
The quote is on page 3 of this web version. I can also give you a hard copy of the issue if you'd like.
The accurate figure is in the passage quoted above, not my letter as it appeared in the Texan. I should have said that six million farmers have been forced out since NAFTA's passage, not during its first year. For NAFTA's first year, it's more reasonable to assume that about 1 million Mexican farmers were forced out of work - which is still criminal, although it's not quite as criminal as pushing out 6 million.
You should be able to find a source for the correct figure, notably a 2004 Carnegie Endowment study discussing the effects of NAFTA. Roughly, what happened was that 6 to 6.5 million campesinos and their families were driven off their lands and forced to emigrate northward. Many more have struggled to hold onto their land, despite that structural changes in U.S.-Mexico economic relations have pretty much guaranteed they'll be screwed. Little wonder that Subcomandante Marcos described NAFTA as a "death certificate for the ethnic peoples of Mexico." This is the sort of the history lesson I wanted to share with my letter. The Mexican campesinos don't need the lesson, obviously. Free trade's a bit easier to comprehend when you're the one under the boot.
Today, of course, Mexican farmers (as well as many others living in the world's poorer nations) face another threat that NAFTA will surely make worse, which is ethanol. In the May/June 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs, economists C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senaur describe how ethanol production will raise the costs of basic food items for people all over the planet, which will be especially hard on the planet's poor population. It's a very important article, and I encourage you to read it if you can get your hands on a back issue or find it online. By the authors' calculations, "1.2 billion people could be chronically hungry by 2025" - 600 million more than their 2003 projection, due largely to the fact that the world's poor spend most of their income on food.
Ethanol, it should be added, is a complete joke, a band-aid for the global cancer of energy consumption. But this is what happens when predatory corporations are allowed to rule the planet. Issues of human survival are outstripped by short-term profit goals.
Anyway, thanks for bringing all this to my attention. I'm mildly annoyed with myself for having goofed that up.
. . .
DC Tedrow
So I was called out on a mistake I made. It happens. Could be worse, I suppose. It's not like I claimed that NAFTA gave people jobs, etc.
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