AGRICULTURAL TRADE LIBERALIZATION UNDER NAFTA: REPORTING ON THE REPORT CARD

Fairchild and Aubin

The results of the pre-workshop and post-workshop “report cards” are
presented and compared in this paper. The pre-workshop responses are de-
noted as the “first” report card and the post-workshop responses as the “sec-
ond” report card. An example of the report card is included in an appendix. It
should be noted that the report card is not intended to be a statistically-repre-
sentative sample of opinions in the three NAFTA countries, either separately or
in total. The results, therefore, are not directly projectable to any of the respec-
tive populations. Rather, the report cards are intended simply to reveal the
opinions of a group of interested and reasonably-well-informed representa-
tives from university agricultural colleges, agricultural agencies of government,
and production agriculture in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The
results tend to be both interesting and informative with respect to what we have
learned from the experiences of NAFTA.

REPORT CARD RESULTS

Which Country Do You Represent?

Canada, United States, and Mexico were represented in the first report
card by 41, 49, and 10 percent of participants, respectively, compared to the
second report card representation of 44,47, and 9 percent, respectively. Forty-
one workshop participants completed the first report card compared to 34 par-
ticipants who completed the second report card. Canada and the United States
had nearly equal representation, together accounting for about 90 percent of
participants in both report cards, compared to Mexico with about 10 percent in
both report cards.

Overall Benefit to Agriculture in Own Country?

Workshop participants were asked to what extent NAFTA has benefit-
ted their country in terms of facilitating trade in agriculture generally? Inter-
estingly, in the first report card, three-fourths of Canadian and Mexican partici-
pants felt that NAFTA had been a large benefit and one-quarter believed that it
had been a small benefit (Table 1). Only 20 percent of U.S. participants thought
NAFTA had produced large benefits, while 80 percent felt there had been small
benefits.

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