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New NAFTA talks 'threaten family farms, health and environment'

By agency reporter
November 20, 2017

The fifth round of secret negotiations on a new North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has begun in Mexico. Farm policy will be a central topic of discussion among negotiators from Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

Bill Waren, senior trade analyst at Friends of the Earth, made the following statement, "Environmentalists and family farm advocates in the US., Canada, and Mexico are sounding the alarm about the potential threat to sustainable family farms and the planet of a new NAFTA, negotiated in secret and written to the specifications of multinational agribusiness giants.

"NAFTA has entrenched the worst impacts of chemical-intensive industrial agriculture, controlled by an increasingly consolidated and more powerful set of corporations. Trump’s rewrite of NAFTA is likely to compound the harms of this system imposed on family farmers, workers, consumers, animal welfare and the environment. If Trump and these mega-corporations get their way, we can expect decreased regulation to lead to greater harms to our health from pesticides and unsafe food and further depletion and degradation of North America’s soil, water, climate and biodiversity.  

"We need to abandon the current approach to trade policy and agriculture that puts the bottom lines of corporations like Monsanto ahead of the public interest. Instead, we must support trade deals that put the well-being of family farmers, food chain workers, consumers, rural communities, animals and the environment first."

* For more information read Seven ways Trump’s NAFTA threatens family farmers, animal welfare, our health and the environment here

* Friends of the Earth https://foe.org/

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