Nafta Talks Have High Stakes for Two Texas Bridge Owners
- 6 years ago
Nafta Talks Have High Stakes for Two Texas Bridge Owners
“We used to joke that if you want to own a bridge, you have to be named Sam, Sam or Uncle Sam,” said Mr. Vale, who
owns a two-lane crossing in Rio Grande City, a bit more than an hour’s drive from Mr. Sparks’s four-lane roadway.
Border bridges, he said, are “ground zero for Nafta trade, so if you start reducing the U. S.-Mexico trade, it will hit them first.”
If it becomes expensive to send products north, Mexico could turn to one of the 45 countries with which it has free-trade agreements.
Sam Vale and Sam Sparks Jr. own two bridges that stretch across the Rio Grande, connecting farmers on either side with markets on the other,
and linking communities in South Texas and northern Mexico that sometimes meet in the middle.
Trucks carried $373 billion in cargo across bridges on the southern border last year, accounting for
71 percent of all trade in goods with Mexico, according to the American Trucking Association.
The Trump administration wrapped up a fifth round of wrangling over the North American Free Trade Agreement, or Nafta, this week in Mexico City.
Private crossings to Mexico are a rich franchise under the North American Free Trade Agreement,
but discussions on reopening the accord have put that bonanza at risk.
It’s a different story for watermelons and onions, which are trucked in from the depths of Mexico,
filling the northbound lanes of Mr. Sparks’s bridge on their way to American stores.
“We used to joke that if you want to own a bridge, you have to be named Sam, Sam or Uncle Sam,” said Mr. Vale, who
owns a two-lane crossing in Rio Grande City, a bit more than an hour’s drive from Mr. Sparks’s four-lane roadway.
Border bridges, he said, are “ground zero for Nafta trade, so if you start reducing the U. S.-Mexico trade, it will hit them first.”
If it becomes expensive to send products north, Mexico could turn to one of the 45 countries with which it has free-trade agreements.
Sam Vale and Sam Sparks Jr. own two bridges that stretch across the Rio Grande, connecting farmers on either side with markets on the other,
and linking communities in South Texas and northern Mexico that sometimes meet in the middle.
Trucks carried $373 billion in cargo across bridges on the southern border last year, accounting for
71 percent of all trade in goods with Mexico, according to the American Trucking Association.
The Trump administration wrapped up a fifth round of wrangling over the North American Free Trade Agreement, or Nafta, this week in Mexico City.
Private crossings to Mexico are a rich franchise under the North American Free Trade Agreement,
but discussions on reopening the accord have put that bonanza at risk.
It’s a different story for watermelons and onions, which are trucked in from the depths of Mexico,
filling the northbound lanes of Mr. Sparks’s bridge on their way to American stores.