The leaders of Canada, Mexico and the United States will meet here Monday for an annual summit on the North American Free Trade Agreement, amid sharp criticism of the pact in the US presidential race.
As US President George W. Bush meets with his Mexican counterpart, Felipe Calderon, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in New Orleans, US workers' unions and the Democratic White House hopefuls have lambasted NAFTA.
Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who are battling for the Democratic nomination, have warned that they are willing to re-negotiate parts of the agreement if elected president in November.
NAFTA, which aims to eliminate tariffs on products traded between the three countries, came into effect on January 1, 1994 under Clinton's husband, then-president Bill Clinton.
The trade pact has been a frequent target of labor union charges that it has helped bleed the United States of manufacturing jobs.
"The leaders will probably use the event to underscore the importance of NAFTA at a time when the agreement is coming under fire from the Democratic candidates in the primary race," said Peter DeShazo at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Dan Fisk, the US National Security Council's senior director ...   more »

The UN food agency said the world faced a "silent tsunami" of soaring food prices ahead of a summit here Tuesday aimed at developing a plan to tackle a potential hunger crisis.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said high food prices threatened to plunge more than 100 million people into hunger, ahead of the summit of policymakers and experts being hosted by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
"This is the new face of hunger -- the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are," said WFP executive director Josette Sheeran.
"The response calls for large-scale, high-level action by the global community, focused on emergency and longer-term solutions."
Experts believe high food prices have pushed around 100 million people deeper into poverty, she said, adding that the situation needed the same kind of action and generosity as that witnessed following the 2004 Asian tsunami.
"What we are seeing now is affecting more people on every continent, destroying even more livelihoods and the nutrition losses will hurt children for a lifetime."
Food prices have been spiralling due to the use of biofuels to combat climate change; rising populations; strong demand from ...   more »

By Patrick Barta
Word Count: 896
For all the economists and consumers who hope high food prices are temporary, here's one reason why they probably won't be: Farm costs are skyrocketing, making permanently higher prices essential for farmers to keep expanding production.
Inflation is biting farmers world-wide. In New Zealand, farm wages are up as much as 20% this year, and the average price of a dairy cow has jumped to more than $1,900 -- almost double last year's average of about $1,000. In Thailand and Indonesia, farmers are complaining about sharp increases in the price of fertilizer and diesel fuel.
In the American Midwest, land ...
Original Source
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I don't want to alarm anybody, but maybe it's time for Americans to start stockpiling food.
No, this is not a drill.
You've seen the TV footage of food riots in parts of the developing world. Yes, they're a long way away from the U.S. But most foodstuffs operate in a global market. When the cost of wheat soars in Asia, it will do the same here.
Reality: Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are about to start rising a lot faster.
"Load up the pantry," says Manu Daftary, one of Wall Street's top investors and the manager of the Quaker Strategic Growth mutual fund. "I think prices are going higher. People are too complacent. They think it isn't going to happen here. But I don't know how the food companies can absorb higher costs." (Full disclosure: I am an investor in Quaker Strategic)
Stocking up on food may not replace your long-term investments, but it may make a sensible home for some of your shorter-term cash. Do ...   more »

By Spengler
The global food crisis is a monetary phenomenon, an unintended consequence of America's attempt to inflate its way out of a market failure. There are long-term reasons for food prices to rise, but the unprecedented spike in grain prices during the past year stems from the weakness of the American dollar. Washington's economic misery now threatens to become a geopolitical catastrophe.
Months ago, I offered that China, Russia and other cash-rich nations held the antidote to the incipient credit crisis: "If the US wants to remain the magnet for world capital flows it became during the 1990s, it will have to allow the savers of the world to become partners in the US economy, that is, to buy into its first-rank companies."(Western grasshoppers and Chinese ants, Asia Times Online, September 5, 2007.)
No such thing occurred, of course, as Washington has made it clear that it would not allow sovereign funds to own the likes of Citicorp. What are the world's investors doing with the trillion dollars a year they used to invest in American securities, including subprime derivatives and various forms of collateralized obligations that turned out to have more obligation than collateral? They aren't buying American ...   more »