WikipediaExtracts:North American Free Trade Agreement
Extracted from Wikipedia --
The North American Free Trade Agreement (Spanish: Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte, TLCAN; French: Accord de libre-échange nord-américain, ALÉNA), referred to colloquially in the Anglosphere as NAFTA, ( NAF-tə) was an agreement signed by Canada, Mexico, and the United States that created a trilateral trade bloc in North America. The agreement came into force on January 1, 1994, and superseded the 1988 Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Canada. The NAFTA trade bloc formed one of the largest trade blocs in the world by gross domestic product.
The impetus for a North American free trade zone began with U.S. president Ronald Reagan, who made the idea part of his 1980 presidential campaign. After the signing of the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement in 1988, the administrations of U.S. president George H. W. Bush, Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney agreed to negotiate what became NAFTA. Each submitted the agreement for ratification in their respective capitals in December 1992, but NAFTA faced significant opposition in both the United States and Canada. All three countries ratified NAFTA in 1993 after the addition of two side agreements, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC) and the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC).
Passage of NAFTA resulted in the elimination or reduction of barriers to trade and investment between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The effects of the agreement regarding issues such as employment, the environment, and economic growth have been the subject of political disputes. Research on NAFTA presents a mixed representation of its impact on Mexico. Although some economic analyses indicated that NAFTA benefited the broader North American economies and the average consumers, many small farmers and rural workers in Mexico suffered falling crop prices, job losses, and inequality as subsidized U.S. agricultural imports undercut local production. Studies found that productivity gains were concentrated among large agribusinesses in the north, while southern and Indigenous regions experienced deepening poverty. This contributed to the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. NAFTA also failed to generate sufficient employment in Mexico, pushing many displaced workers to migrate to the United States in search of economic stability.
After U.S. president Donald Trump took office in January 2017, he sought to replace NAFTA with a new agreement, beginning negotiations with Canada and Mexico. In September 2018, the United States, Mexico, and Canada reached an agreement to replace NAFTA with the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), and all three countries had ratified it by March 2020. NAFTA remained in force until USMCA was implemented. In April 2020, Canada and Mexico notified the U.S. that they were ready to implement the agreement. The USMCA took effect on July 1, 2020, replacing NAFTA.
