WBAI Radio’s Building Bridges:

Community & Labor Report – National Edition

Produced & Hosted by Mimi Rosenberg & Ken Nash



NAFTA at 10

New Year's Day 2004 marked the tenth anniversary of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) which caused wide scale job loss in the U.S. especially in the manufacturing sector, displaced Mexican farmers from their land, and greatly expanded the low wage maquiladora sector in Mexico. Now the U.S. is promoting expansion of NAFTA to Central America with CAFTA and throughout the Americas with the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

With

· MARTHA OJEDA, Director of the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, a maquiladora worker and a union organizer .

"We got low wages, sexual harassment, environmental destruction and birth defects. Most maquiladora workers are very young, between 16 & 25, because their eyes, backs and hands haven't given out yet -- their hours are so long that their youth passes without seeing the sun."

· ANTONIA JUHASZ, Project Director with the International Forum on Globalization

"Ten years of NAFTA, nine of the WTO, and over 50 of the Intl. Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank has led directly to environmental degradation, job loss and human rights abuses for those who gain jobs, &

assaults on access to the necessities of life. As the benefits increasingly and more clearly go to a dwindling pool of global elites, the demand for

alternatives among the rest of the world grows and unites."

· LAUREN CARLSEN, Director of the Americas Program of the Interhemispheric Resource Center based in Mexico City. "NAFTA has displaced 1.75 million farmers from their land, forcing them to

migrate to the cities or the U.S.. Farm prices, especially for maize [corn], have plummeted in the face of subsidized imports from the United States."

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Building Bridges is regularly broadcast over WBAI, 99.5 FM in the N.Y.C Metropolitan area on Mondays from 7-8pm EST and streamed at http://www.2600.com/offthehook/hot2.ram

for more information email knash@igc.org