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Transportation's relationship with NAFTA
Story Date: 1/4/2018
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Source: POLITICO'S MORNING AGRICULTURE, 1/3/18
As the White House continues to threaten a pullout of what the president has called the worst trade deal in history, thousands of transportation jobs up and down the Mississippi River and across truck and rail networks are in jeopardy, Pro Trade's Doug Palmer reports.
The ports story: Barges with tons of grain are shipped along the Mississippi. Much of the cargo is offloaded at the Port of South Louisiana, a massive complex that stretches over 54 miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. From there, ships take it around the world, including to nearby Mexico, which imported $3.6 billion of wheat, corn and other cereal grains from the United States last year.
"We're actually the largest grain-exporting port in the United States," Paul Aucoin, the port's executive director, told Doug. "All the grain barges from the Midwestern states come down river to the Port of South Louisiana."
The trucking story: A North American economy without NAFTA would snarl trucking and shipping patterns and upend supply chains that have created hundreds of thousands of jobs. The trucking sector's employment has increased to 1.47 million workers in 2017, from 1.18 million in 1994, the first year of NAFTA. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. NAFTA freight is carried by trucks, according to the Transportation Department.
The railroad story: Tearing up NAFTA would have a "huge" impact on railroads, said Tom Hamberger, president and CEO of the Association of American Railroads, employing one of Trump's favorite words. "You can't just uproot and unwind 25 years of investment," he said.
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