We need to save the dying businesses in the American South

A little over two years ago, I volunteered at an urban farm in Virginia called Lynchburg Grows. This farm had a lot of business back in the day, particularly with flowers. The roses they grew had been distributed throughout the world at some pretty fancy places, including galas at the White House.

It was when Bill Clinton passed NAFTA, however, that the farm began to go downhill. In the mid-90s, Lynchburg Grows stopped producing roses, as several industries in the U.S., including horticulture, saw their profits wither and their jobs go overseas.

The farm didn’t recover until recently, when they decided to re-open and not only sell flowers again, but become a source of organic, nutritious food for families living in impoverished communities who would otherwise not be able to access fresh fruits and vegetables.

The steady loss of jobs in the United States has been alarming, particularly in the South. It is not surprising in the Northeast for me to walk down an industrial street and see signs on buildings like “I wish this was open.” It’s a well-known fact that many rust-belt companies and manufacturers relocated to Southern states like Mississippi because of the cheaper taxes, among other reasons.

The decline of manufacturing in the South coupled with the Great Recession ensured the devastating effects of NAFTA were further cemented for years to come. In North Carolina in the 1940s, 40% of the jobs were in textiles and manufacturing. In 2013, textiles and manufacturing jobs made up just 1.1% of North Carolina’s economy, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. High Point, NC, which was regarded as the “furniture capital of the world” at one point, saw a majority of its business dwindle in the 1990s in subsequent swing with NAFTA implementation.

One of my friends, who comes from a small town in northwestern North Carolina, corroborated the loss of numerous furniture and textile companies throughout the area, which left many of the town’s blue collar workers despondent and without employment.

“Almost everyone knew someone who had been laid-off from these companies,” said Phillip Wyatt, 28, a mass communication student at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. “Think about what happened for the undocumented immigrants who lost their jobs, too. Where were they going to go?”

There has been, however a second uptick of jobs in the Southeastern United States. Recently, car manufacturers like Honda and Toyota have opened up plants in states like Alabama and many companies have migrated South from Michigan.

Trends like these show that industry may not be dead entirely below the Mason-Dixon Line. But, with the advent of such recent agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), not only the South but the entire country could be at risk for having their industries wiped out, perhaps for good.

Don’t get me wrong. I hate nationalism and the notion of believing in American supremacy and domination over any part of the world is repulsive. The idea that a country can be considered “developed” and another country can be denigrated as “third-world” is insulting and creates a skewed sense of superiority that isn’t rooted in anything.

However, while the TPP will create jobs in other countries that may not have had the industry beforehand, it is also giving enormous power to multinational corporations that will continue to exploit the people in the countries they have transferred the jobs to.

In addition to this, poverty and violence in the United States will become unthinkably higher as more industries leave and the prison system becomes one of the few sources of employment in the US, particularly in the South, where Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the nation, and in rural mid-western towns.

As filmmaker Eugene Zarecki states in his insightful documentary The House We Live In, the high levels of incarceration and murder in the United States is a “Holocaust in slow motion.” So much for “never again.”