This week is the North American Free Trade Agreement’s 14th anniversary. It has been anything but free – NAFTA has failed workers, communities, and economies here and abroad.

Here in Maine, we’ve lost roughly 24,000 manufacturing jobs thanks to NAFTA’s failed policies. We’ve learned the hard way that trade agreements like NAFTA hurt Mainers and hurt the people on the other end, displacing farmers and encouraging sweatshop style manufacturing with few to no labor or environmental regulations.

Just last week, the Senate voted in favor of another so-called free trade agreement with Peru. Like NAFTA, this most recent debacle called the Peru Free Trade Agreement, like its predecessor, promotes off-shoring and an overall race to the bottom for wages, working conditions and environmental practices.

If that’s not bad enough, like NAFTA, it includes provisions that grant corporations extraordinary rights and put our environmental, zoning and public interest policies at risk – in essence disempowering our democracy. Despite this, Sen. Olympia Snowe and Sen. Susan Collins voted for the Peru agreement, which extends the failed NAFTA-style model into South America.

Although there were attempts to improve the labor and environmental provisions, the changes were vague and included no independent mechanism for enforcement, essentially amounting to a band-aid fix for a broken leg. The Peru agreement is cut from the same cloth as NAFTA – failure. Until we come up with a new model for trade, we will continue to see the disastrous impacts here and abroad.

Kate Brennan, Lewiston