A possible dissolution of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) wouldn’t separate all industries that are part of the agreement, this according to New York Times economic columnist Eduardo Porter.
The San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce organized a discussion with Porter as part of their Good Government Speaker Series, on Thursday, at their headquarters in downtown San Diego.
Porter currently writes the Economic Scene column for the New York Times and was formerly a member of the Times’ editorial board. He is also the author of “The Price of Everything” and covered Hispanic population trends for the Wall Street Journal.
At Thursday’s meeting, he addressed the U.S.-Mexico economic relationship, NAFTA negotiations, and what the termination of the agreement would implicate for the U.S. economy.
“If NAFTA is eliminated, all bets are off, but I think that the highly integrated industries such as the automotive sector are going to maintain their integration against everything,” Porter said to La Prensa San Diego. “The current relationship would go on, but what would happen is that future investment would stop in Mexico from companies like Ford and grow in the United States.”
The greatest impact of a possible dissolution of NAFTA would be for agriculture, prices in exports from Mexico like pork and corn would increase.
“A modernization of NAFTA would be very helpful as well as an integration of an employment chapter so there is more attention in jobs,” Porter added. “There are other industries that are not part of the agreement because they didn’t exist before the agreement like e-commerce which would be beneficial to also add it.”
Porter who is also a Pacific Leadership Fellow at the Center on Global Transformation at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) will lead a workshop for local journalists about how to cover economy and the current negotiations of NAFTA on Friday at Centro Cultural Tijuana. Newsweek en Espanol and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UCSD will host Friday’s workshop.
