NAFTA may have fattened Canada
High-fructose corn syrup flowing freely over border spiked obesity, study suggests
The North American Free Trade Agreement may have dramatically changed the Canadian diet by boosting consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, a new study suggests.
That boost arrested a years-long decline in total sugar consumption. And it shifted Canadians away from liquid sweeteners such as maltose and molasses toward high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener that has been linked to the obesity epidemic.
The peer-reviewed study, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, found that as tariffs on high-fructose corn syrup dropped over a four-year period, consumption grew: from 21.2 calories of corn syrup per day in 1994 to 62.9 calories per day by 1998.
NAFTA may thus have contributed to growing obesity and diabetes rates over that time, its authors say.
“There are free-trade deals being negotiated all over the world, and NAFTA has been used as a blueprint for many of them,” said Pepita Barlow, a doctoral student at Oxford University and the lead researcher on the paper. “In some ways, this is an opportunity to think about who benefits from these deals, and who loses — and how we can craft them to better promote health and wellness.”
The connection between free-trade agreements and health has not been well-studied, Barlow said. To date, most research on globalization and nutrition has examined the effects of foreign direct investment: how consumption patterns change when multinational food companies, such as Coca-Cola or the global snackfood maker Mondelez, begin producing and advertising in new markets.
Joseph Glauber, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute and the former chief economist at the USDA, said he would expect that sort of investment to have a larger impact on consumption, relative to trade. But the research, he acknowledged, is in its early days.
“This connection between trade and nutrition is getting to be a very big question,” Glauber said. “I think the effect is probably pretty minor, on the tariff side. But there’s a huge issue with foreign direct investment and advertising, which has become very aggressive. And that’s all a part of trade liberalization.”
Tariff reductions do make food ingredients cheaper, irrespective of their nutritional qualities. Before NAFTA was adopted in 1994, Canada had a tariff of 5 per cent on high-fructose corn syrup. Under NAFTA, Canada agreed to phase out that tariff, while maintaining protections on sugar- and beet-based syrups such as fructose, maltose, glucose and molasses.
As a result, researchers found, consumption stayed flat on those protected sweeteners, but spiked for high-fructose corn syrup. Countries that are economically similar to Canada, but did not join NAFTA — such as Australia and the U.K. — did not see a similar effect.
At the same time, obesity rates increased from 13.4 per cent in 1994 to 14.8 per cent in 1998. According to Canada’s national statistics agency, 14.2 million people — roughly 38 per cent of all Canadians — are currently obese.
This cannot be credited entirely, or even predominantly, to NAFTA, Barlow cautioned: Obesity rates were trending up anyway. And obesity has continued to climb, even as Canadian consumption of soft drinks (a major source of high-fructose corn syrup) has decreased.
But Barlow and her co-authors believe the correlation is strong enough to suggest that the trade agreement did likely contribute to obesity by increasing access at a critical time to a sweetener that some researchers consider uniquely likely to cause weight gain.