Nicholas Freudenberg, director of the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute and Distinguished Professor of Public Health, CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, and Alyshia Galvez, Associate Professor, Lehman College, have written an op-ed appearing in the Dallas News asserting that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has led to dramatic changes in health in Mexico.
Freudenberg and Galvez argue that the “NAFTA diet” has been shaped in large part by changes in food availability resulting from the agreement, which awarded the United States the right to export and invest more in Mexico without a reduction in domestic corn subsidies. This, coupled with the aggressive marketing of now ubiquitously-available food, and a migration to cities from farms after Mexico’s economy collapsed, led to observable changes in health: “between 1988 and 1999, the prevalence of overweight and obesity in Mexico almost doubled, from 33 percent to 59 percent.”
Read the full commentary here.
