>> > Why can't you say it? NAFTA allows US agricultural goods, which
>>require very
>>> little labor, to displace Mexican agriculture, which is very
>>>labor intensive.
>>> So, let's say that 1 farm worker displaces 20 in Mexico and that
>>>10 of these
>> > displaced farm workers are employed, displacing 3 U.S. workers.
>> >
>
>But that has not happened yet (although Sherman Robinson is still
>scared that it might)...
The ejidos have been suffering through a deepening crisis for at least two decades now; supplemental income has been needed for some time--I don't think free trade can be blamed alone. But if there is someone here with expertise, that would be most helpful. As Brad's colleague Alain deJanvry may point out, the inability to make a transition to (so called) higher value added fruit and vegetable exports has had many causes (and it was on the possibility of this transition that NAFTA was sold) : lack of access to credit, reduction of subsidies for crucial inputs as they grow more expensive, lack of productive foreign investment (despite the privatization of land) and continuing US non tariff barriers. I am not sure that NAFTA can alone be held responsible, though the touted agricultural transformations seem not to have been realized. The presures on the border should then only build. Magdalena Barros Nock argues that neo-liberalism as a whole has led to the continuing crisis of the ejidos. See Disappearing Peasantries: Rural Labour in Africa, Asia and Latin America, ed. Deborah Bryceson, Cristobal Kay and Jos Mooj.
RB
ps I sent Doug a private note on one of Bronfenbrenner's journalistic summaries of her work a month or so ago; I don't see how her own findings in any way prove that NAFTA has been the main cause of shut downs upon unionization or threat of unionization. Her own evidence that in only one of ten cases do firms threaten to move to Mexico if there a move to unionize. It would seem that the more important reform would be of domestic laws that allow firms to respond as such to unionization drives, not NAFTA per se.