On CAFTA

ON CAFTA -- (House of Representatives - May 03, 2005)

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 5 minutes.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, Bloomberg News reported today, and I read the quote, "CAFTA," the expansion of NAFTA to all of Latin America, "will fail in Congress." And Peter Morici, a University of Maryland professor and former chief economist for the International Trade Commission, comments: "CAFTA is in trouble because of frustration with Bush administration inaction on the trade deficit and the Chinese yuan," which means that we are not dealing with the difficulties of the exchange rate between not just China and the United States but several other nations.

One and a half years ago, a 7-member Congressional delegation traveled to Mexico to examine the modern template for all of these trade agreements that is called NAFTA, the North American, I like to call it "failed" Trade Agreement, and the impact it has had on working families and farmers on both sides of that border.

The delegation included the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Costello), the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Grijalva), the gentlewoman from Illinois (Ms. Schakowsky), the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Solis), the gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Thompson), the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland), and myself. Our delegation produced a final report entitled "NAFTA at Ten: Journey to Mexico." It is included on the Web site, www.kaptur.house.gov.

Mr. Speaker, at the end of my Special Order, I include for the RECORD a summary of recommendations that our delegation made to fix NAFTA. In that vein, during our trip we met other parliamentarians, including the Honorable Victor Suarez Carrera of Mexico, during that journey. Representative Victor Suarez Carrera is currently serving as a federal representative for the 16th District of Mexico City in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, so he would be our counterpart.

He made an eloquent speech saying, I plead with you, Congress of the United States, we the people of Mexico want good trade, not just free trade. He expressed a deep desire to visit our country to tell the American people how NAFTA was not just negatively impacting the people of our country but also the people of Mexico.

And so as this Congress considers an expansion of NAFTA to Central America, the CAFTA agreement, to Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, we are honored to welcome Deputy Suarez to the United States. He will be arriving tomorrow with his delegation of Mexican parliamentarians. They will be here Wednesday and Thursday and participate in extensive talks here in Congress on U.S.-Canadian and Mexico Interparliamentary cooperation on NAFTA and CAFTA. They will also travel to other places in the United States.

I want to put up a chart to show the difficulty from the United States standpoint. Every single year since NAFTA was signed, rather than the job creation we were promised, the United States has exacted larger and larger trade deficits with both Mexico and Canada. Those numbers were supposed to be exactly the reverse.

In Mexico, wages have been lowered. And Mr. Suarez comes from an area called Scala in Mexico, the southeastern region of Mexico, and we were literally in these fields with him talking to the farmers who have been displaced from their land in the nation of Mexico. It was so tragic to hear their stories. The American people need to hear the stories from the people of Mexico. It is not just our workers and farmers that are being hurt; they are being hurt as well.
Mr. Suarez is currently president of the Committee for the Center for Studies of Sustainable Rural Development and Food Sovereignty within the Chamber of Deputies. It is important to note he has been a leader and promoter of a movement in Mexico called The Countryside Cannot Take It Any More. He is also active in international peasant movements and in an inner-American network called Agriculture and Democracy.

The objectives of our trinational meeting among parliamentarians are to create an intercontinental space for reflection, exchange of ideas and collaboration related to alternative forms of economic integration and trinational development that helps people better their lives rather than reduce their livelihoods and looks ahead to what happens next after NAFTA as we stop CAFTA in its tracks.

Our effort is to foster dialogue and exchange between legislators and civil society organizations to further develop ideas for alternatives to the current framework surrounding the flawed free-trade model and to find better ways to achieve trinational development.

Another goal is to identify some of the more critical impacts of the 11 years of NAFTA, focusing on an analysis of both national level and sector-specific effects. And finally, we seek consensus among our parliaments on possible future actions that could be taken trinationally among legislators and between organizations and civil society to directly address some of the critical impacts of NAFTA and look ahead to negotiation of a NAFTA-plus agreement.

One of the border towns that we visited, and I put up this particular picture, was of women and men living in these tiny shacks who have been displaced from the countryside.

Mr. Speaker, we welcome Mr. Suarez Carrera with his colleagues and look forward to the launching of a continental effort to speak out on behalf of farmers and working people of the Americas.

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