American craft breweries sold 482,309 barrels valued at $125.4 million to customers overseas in 2017. Over half of those exports went north to our good beer-drinking friends, the Canadians. Mexican brewers are the largest customer for American barley. If NAFTA negotiations don’t go well, we may all see the cost on our tab.
Trade rules typically cover a category of goods or services and affect all firms engaged in trade. Investment disputes, on the other hand, are usually about a state’s treatment of an individual enterprise.
North America has a sweet relationship — we are each other’s largest trading partners in chocolate.
Before NAFTA went into effect, Americans ate around one pound of avocados per person each year. Today, 82 percent of the avocados we consume in the United States arrive here from Mexico.
The operator’s manual for the popular entry-level Honda Civic is 601 pages. It doesn’t fit in the glove box; it comes in the form of an electronic document to download, which seems appropriate considering the number of electronic components in the car. High-tech, high-cost, components are lightweight and positioned to move long distances on a just-in-time basis.
Every January, the global automobile industry gathers in the Motor City for the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS). In a celebration of ingenuity, companies display futuristic concept cars, present cutting-edge technologies, and promote their latest offerings.
Americans may be among the world’s most prodigious consumer of turkeys, but turkeys have become an increasingly popular holiday food in Mexico. Ninety percent of the turkeys at those Mexican fiestas will have come from American farms – in part thanks to NAFTA.
A whopping 20 percent of the nearly 400 million pounds of cranberries we consume per year are eaten during Thanksgiving week alone. It’s a logical growth strategy to share our love of cranberries with global eaters year-round, but without a trade agreement with our largest markets, we could lose out to growers from other countries.
If the Trump administration seeks an end to binding dispute settlement procedures, it would represent a significant departure from decades of the United States leading the global charge for making dispute settlement in trade agreements binding and enforceable.