ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC). It attempts to get a “handle” on NAFTA’s environmental provisions in the context of our interestin agriculture. The chapter describes the environmental provisions of NAFTA and its environmental side agreement. It summarizes the concerns and perceptions of environmental and commodity groups, as elicited from personal interviews, to assess how the environmental provisions might apply to agriculture. A few studies have taken the additional steps of attempting to assess the effect of liberalized agricultural trade in North America on input use and environmental factors. For the most part, agricultural economists have been reticent to examine NAFTA’s environmental provisions, and maybe for good reason. NAAEC establishes a new framework and infrastructure, called the Commission on Environmental Cooperation, to address current and future environmental issues in the region.
