PERSPECTIVE ON NAFTA : Trade Deal ‘Remedies’ Are Toothless : Establishing powerless ‘commissions’ will only paper over the damage to environmental laws, U.S. jobs and more.

During his campaign, President Clinton said the North American Free Trade Agreement was unacceptable unless certain changes and additions were made. To that end, Clinton called for “supplemental negotiations” with Mexico and Canada.

The Clinton Administration is about to announce the conclusion of these talks, and will certainly declare that NAFTA has been “fixed.”

Unfortunately, the majority of Clinton’s NAFTA concerns, such as ensuring Americans good jobs and safe food, never even made it onto the negotiating table. The so-called supplemental agreements will consist of nothing but the establishment of commissions on labor and the environment, with very limited jurisdiction and powers. Their roles will merely be to study and to cooperate on enforcement of existing laws in the NAFTA countries. They do not remedy the deal’s many fundamental flaws.

We have no gripe with the concept of a North American trade agreement. We agree, however, with citizens groups in Mexico and Canada: This NAFTA is not good for most people or the environment of North America, and the side deals do not change this.

After analyzing NAFTA for months, in October, 1992, presidential candidate Clinton listed, among others, these problems needing “fixing”: safeguarding U.S. wage levels and manufacturing jobs, shielding U.S. environmental and consumer laws from challenge and elimination as illegal trade barriers, ensuring the safety of imported foods, defending U.S. family farmers, opening NAFTA to “democratic accountability” and “public participation”, generating new funds for environmental cleanup as well as assistance and retraining for U.S. workers who would lose jobs to NAFTA and enforcing North American environmental and labor standards.

Many of these are fundamental flaws that no commission could fix: for instance, the terms in NAFTA that undermine federal, state and local environmental, health and safety laws by exposing them to challenge as illegal trade barriers. Mexico has already successfully challenged one longstanding environmental law, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, before another trade body, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The law, which forbids the sale of tuna caught with methods that kill dolphins, was declared an illegal barrier to trade by a GATT tribunal, meaning the United States must eliminate the law or face trade sanctions.

Luckily for Flipper, GATT contains certain procedural emergency brakes that stalled the dolphin case. NAFTA, however, allows the same challenges, contains the same rules and has no “emergency brakes.”

No commission could correct NAFTA’s investment rules promoting unsustainable development. A NAFTA goal is to increase trade and exploitation of water, fossil fuels, forests and other natural resources. Meanwhile, NAFTA would declare raw log export bans, renewable energy programs, recycling requirements and other conservation policies illegal trade practices.

NAFTA would provide U.S. companies new means to relocate. U.S. companies in Mexico could ignore labor and environmental laws of both nations, pay high-skilled workers $5 per day and sell their goods in the United States as if the companies were still located here.

The cost of such permissiveness can be seen in the free-trade zone along the U.S.-Mexico border. The Sierra Club estimates that it would cost $20 billion to clean up this polluted manufacturing strip, labeled an environmental “cesspool” by the American Medical Assn. The so-called supplemental agreements do not generate a steady stream of “new” money for this, much less the $5 billion per year that organized labor estimates it would cost to help the hundreds of thousands of workers that would be hurt, at least in the short term.

The idea underlying the commission was to impose sanctions on countries that used lax environmental and labor-law enforcement to lure investment. Sadly, the actual commissions’ roles will be merely to study, without particular timetables, “unjustifiable and repeated” patterns of non-enforcement of domestic labor and environmental laws. If, after months or years of study, a commission finds an egregious pattern of abuse, formal review can be initiated only if two of the three NAFTA countries approve it. Formal reviews would lack public access or participation.

Clinton and his trade representative, Mickey Kantor, repeatedly promised that this review process would have “teeth” in the form of trade sanctions. It is already clear that such “teeth” will be inaccessible, at the end of a long and tortuous procedural path.

The Clinton Administration may expect the supplemental agreements to serve Congress as a political fig leaf that allows members to support NAFTA. However, voters across the country know that this agreement is about their environment, their food and their jobs and that these side deals do not fix NAFTA’s real problems.