U.S. Chamber of Commerce Warns Against Abandoning NAFTA

Falls Church, VA (AIIS) - The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is cautioning against pulling out of NAFTA, with the head of the organization saying such a move “would be an economic, political and national-security disaster.”

Both as a candidate and as president, Trump has bashed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as being unfair to the United States. Amid threats to withdraw from the pact, his administration initiated talks with Canada and Mexico to revise the deal.

Several rounds of negotiations have taken place, and Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Thomas Donohue wrote in a Sept. 24 column in The Wall Street Journal that the administration must avoid pushing for certain “ideas that are opposed vociferously by the U.S. business and agriculture communities, as well as by the Canadian and Mexican governments,” since they “would all but guarantee that negotiations break down.”

Ending tariff-free trade in North America, Donohue wrote, “would hit American consumers and exporters in the pocketbook. … Hundreds of thousands of American jobs would be lost, and that’s a conservative estimate.”

“Undermining Nafta [sic] would be a grave and costly mistake that would hurt the very farmers, manufacturers, workers and families this White House purports to protect,” he wrote. “Americans should do everything necessary to avert this grievous self-inflicted wound.”

Courtesy: AIIS