Giving Compass' Take:

• In this interview with Harvest Public Media, author Alyshia Galvez discusses NAFTA from the perspective of Mexico: smallholder farmer were hurt, and overall public health was made worse.

• With the NAFTA policy in flux (but a deal apparently imminent), it's worth looking at how trade policy between the two countries can have detrimental effects to those it's intended to help. Will a new deal improve things at all? How can advocates make sure that both U.S. and Mexican citizens have access to nutritious food?

• Here's how American corn policy has affected the crisis at the border.

The United States and Mexico announced this week there’s a tentative deal in their renegotiation of the nearly 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. A new book, "Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies and the Destruction of Mexico," looks at the connections between the agricultural and food trade policies that the policy has brought about.

Author Alyshia Galvez is a professor of Latin American and Latino Students at Lehman College of the City University of New York. She spoke with Harvest Public Media on Aug. 24.

GALVEZ: Lately, there's been this framing of Mexico being a winner and the U.S. being a loser in terms of the trade deal, and that framing often is a result of that simple math of the trade deficit.

But I think if we take a closer look … it's a much more complicated picture. The reality is that the trade deal has benefited mostly large-scale corporations, so it's contributed to the consolidation of food production and distribution on both sides of the border. ...

So, (the U.S. is) getting a lot of berries and mangoes and limes and avocados that we've developed a real taste for in the last 20 years and didn't necessarily eat that much of previously. That’s a win for us both in terms of our tastes and our availability of things year-round and also our health.

But it's a little bit of a bad deal in terms of how it frames our food systems in both countries: It basically liberates us in the United States from growing what are called specialty crops … But then in exchange, we give Mexico kind of the worst of our food system; ingredients that go into industrialized food processing that have been associated with diet-related illness.

Read the full article about how NAFTA affected Mexicans' health by Erica Hunzinger at Harvest Public Media.