NAFTA and the Food and Agricultural Industries

Abstract

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect on January 1, 1994. Ethical controversies arising fromNAFTA policies, rules, and procedures reflect its character as more than a regional trade agreement designed to lower barriers to trade across US, Canadian, and Mexican borders. It offers far-reaching guarantees to the rights of foreign investors across NAFTA member state borders, including rigorous protection of intellectual property rights – exceedingWorld Trade Organization (WTO) standards. In particular, NAFTA prohibitions and sanctions against a variety of “nontariff barriers” have raised ethical concerns about a threat to national sovereignty and democratic control in promulgating and enforcing domestic health and environmental regulations, including food safety standards. Ethical concerns raised by NAFTA may best be framed as a failure of “moral imagination,” which Patricia Werhane (1999) defines as “the ability to perceive that a web of competing economic relationships is, at the same time a web of moral relationships” (p. 5). From this absence of moral imagination arises the all too common phenomenon of “moral amnesia,” which Werhane defines as “an inability to remember or learn from one’s own and others’ past mistakes and to transfer that knowledge when fresh challenges arise” (p. 7). As a consequence, “mental maps” or “cognitive scripts” that shape business decisions within the narrow confines of economic “rationality” tend to prompt a “setting aside of moral considerations in the pace of business activities” (p. 11).