Effects Of The Treaty On Mexico s Agricultural Economy...

Development is a highly contested and complex concept, it has different meanings for different people, and have had different approaches through time. This paper examines the concept of development and its effects in the capitalist era and explores how the globalisation agenda has established the requests of the neo-liberalism project by the trade and financial liberalization and the new global regulatory system, and affected the developed countries. I argue that the development concept is socially constructed and inextricably linked with western economic structures and variables. The case of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is used to exemplify how the new vision of globalisation through market integration and self†¦show more content†¦456). Development is a historical process, rooted in the colonial discourse, where the north was seen as advanced and the south as primitive (Edelman Haugerud, 2005, p.178; Ziai, 2007, p. 8). This essay examines how developmen t has become a western discourse, a mechanism of progress tied to ideas of social evolution and civilization (Bulloch, 2014, p. 178; Edelman Haugerud, 2005, p.178; Escobar p. 18). The analysis will focus then on how Mexico as a developed country, becomes the model of un-development, the object in need of modernization, and development, thus as the process of improvement and progress, but progress as a subject of economic growth. As Sklair (1994, p. 180) state, Development implies progress from backwardness to modernity. The intent of development under this idea is that it will compensate what is thought as being deficient to accomplish an improved future, the following of a linear path between the traditional undeveloped and the modern developed (Bulloch, 2014, p. 179; Cowen Shenton, 1996, p. 433-445). For post-development theorists such as Esteva or Escobar, development is socially constructed and based in a western economic structure and in the power relationships between developed and developing countries, with a clear domination of the first ones (Escobar p.18, Esteva Prakash, 1998b, p. 175-182). Positivists claim that development can only be sustained and attained by industrialization, which is achieved through human