Free Trade and the Environment

Although it was of course not their intention, Martin and Kathleen Feldstein’s column actually does an outstanding job of supporting the arguments of those nasty “environmental extremists” (their phrase) who argue that, while a free-trade agreement with Mexico would be a tremendous boon for wealthy businessmen in the United States, it would be a disaster for working people in both Mexico and the U.S. The rather obvious and common-sense prediction of these “extremists” is that such an agreement would encourage polluting industries in the heavily regulated U.S. to relocate to Mexico, where the average wage is $4 a day and where almost no environmental regulations are enforced. The result would be a vastly accelerated devastation of the Mexican ecosphere, as well as a tremendous increase in the rate of job elimination in the U.S.

Like most First World industrialists, the Feldsteins apparently regard uncontaminated air, water and soil as some sort of luxury that you might perhaps try to attain once everything else on your agenda is complete.

The truth is, a clean environment is a basic need of both Mexican and American families. The Feldsteins’ absurd attempt to argue that people too poor to afford shelter or food somehow won’t mind having their neighborhoods turned into toxic waste dumps should be exposed as the patronizing and elitist nonsense that it is.

The proposed U.S.-Mexican free-trade agreement is obviously being driven by the greed of powerful people who are rapidly turning our own country into a wasteland; it should be scrapped.

RANDALL SMITH

Central American Information Center

San Diego