Donald Trump Announces Trade Pact with Mexico

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump said on Monday that US and Mexican negotiators reached an agreement on revising the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.

The new pact will not be known as NAFTA, because that name “has a bad connotation,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. The US-Mexico Trade Agreement is “a really good deal for both countries,” Trump said before telephoning Mexican President Enrique Peña in the presence of the media.

Trump said he planned to contact Canada about signing on to the new document while making it clear that Washington’s pact with Mexico will go forward regardless. “I’ll be terminating the existing deal and going into this deal,” Efe quoted the US President as saying in the Oval Office, calling it a “big day for trade”. The President called it “one of the largest trade deals ever made”. Trump said he would speak with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “in a little while”, adding that he hoped Canada and the US could begin talks to resolve their own bilateral issues subsumed under NAFTA “almost immediately”. Trump had been pushing to renegotiate NAFTA since he became president in January 2017, has repeatedly called the trilateral pact in force since 1994 and encompassing more than $1 trillion in annual trade a “disaster” for the US. (IANS)