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Sugar is a good place to start a debate on free trade. Most people eat sugar - probably too much of it this time of year - in one form or another. This sweet, mundane commodity is about to take center stage in another ferocious battle on Capitol Hill over the relative benefits and costs of free trade.

Ten years after the US, Mexico and Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, you might think that debate would be nearer a resolution. But even with a decade's worth of empirical data, it's still murky going. About the only statistic pro- and anti-NAFTA forces agree on is that trade among the partners has more than doubled over the decade, to $621 billion last year.

NAFTA has brought lower prices and more choices for American consumers, and larger markets for US manufacturers. Did it cost jobs or create them? It did both, but neither in quantities that have had much of an impact on the more than $11 trillion US economy.

Mexico had the most to gain or lose from NAFTA and yet, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the pact has been neither the disaster predicted by critics nor the miracle promised by supporters. The World Bank, in its 10-year assessment, found that NAFTA has helped Mexico move toward the development levels of the US and Canada. Because of NAFTA, the report says, per capita income in Mexico is about 5% higher, foreign investment 40% higher, and exports 25% higher than they otherwise would have been.

Free trade agreements alone can't bring prosperity - and it's certainly true that NAFTA hasn't done that in Mexico. But the reasons have less to do with NAFTA and more to do with Mexico's failure to reform its economy and invest more in its citizens. Mexican President Vicente Fox understands this, but his attempts to remake the tax system, pour more money into education and innovation, and reform the rigid labor market have so far failed.

Most 10th anniversary assessments of NAFTA acknowledge that it's hard to separate out the NAFTA effects from all the rest that was going on in the world over the last 10 years.

Even without this pact, trade barriers had begun to fall everywhere, toppled by successful multilateral negotiations in the World Trade Organization and its predecessor organization. Mexico suffered a crippling currency crisis in the mid-1990s. The three-year bust after the US boom has cost millions of jobs here and had a ripple effect on NAFTA partners. The rapid rise of China as an economic force majeure has astonished and unsettled the rest of the world.

NAFTA, on balance, has succeeded in doing precisely what it was intended to do: reduce trade barriers and increase trade among the partners. But that doesn't mean critics won't continue to blame it for every lost job. Free trade in general is under fierce assault. The critics rail that it hurts workers and wrecks the environment; it's capitalism run amok.

Free trade's benefits flow throughout an economy in the form of lower prices and more choices. They are diffuse and sometimes difficult to quantify. In contrast, its costs are borne - painfully - by specific workers in easily identifiable industries, such as electronics manufacturing. Mostly for this reason, none of the Democratic contenders for president supports free trade agreements in their current form.

Even the ostensibly pro-trade President Bush has engaged in protectionism in steel and textiles.

Global trade liberalization talks are stalled, as is Bush's ambitious Free Trade Area of the Americas, which would reduce or eliminate trade barriers among 34 Western Hemisphere nations.

Against this bleak backdrop and its own protectionist missteps, the administration doggedly continues to push the free trade case. The US - Chile free trade agreement takes effect in January and now El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua have signed on to a regional trade pact with the US that is modeled after NAFTA. Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic may yet join that pact, dubbed CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement).

The pact would eliminate industrial tariffs and reduce agricultural subsidies among the partners over more than a decade. But navigating CAFTA through Congress is going to be a tough slog and sugar is a major reason.

Americans pay two to three times the world market price for sugar because the US government since 1981 has guaranteed a minimum price for domestic growers of sugar cane and sugar beets. It does this by restricting imports and buying and storing - or even destroying - excess production.

This is the kind of behavior the US would consider outrageous protectionism if some other country were doing it.

The price of protecting sugar growers from cheaper imports, according to General Accounting Office estimates, is that sugar user - food manufacturers and consumers - pay an extra $1.9 billion a year. Mayor Richard Daley last year blamed these price supports for the general exodus of the candy industry from Chicago.

CAFTA doesn't even propose to get rid of sugar import quotas. But it would raise the current US limit by 75% next year and allow a 2% increase in each of the next 15 years.

That concession is viewed as outright capitulation by the powerful US sugar lobby, which vows to fight CAFTA in Congress. If the sugar lobby is successful, Americans will continue to pay more than they should, cheaper sugar from Central America will be barred from our shores, and the US will continue to speak with a forked tongue on free trade.

Do as we say, not as we do.

This trade pact would extend the legacy of NAFTA to Central America, opening once-closed markets and creating vibrant new opportunities. There is no question that it would disrupt protected industries both here and in other countries. But new opportunities can't flourish if the status quo doesn't change. Helping displaced workers from the sugar and other affected industries find those new opportunities is a wiser investment in America's future than protecting the principle that we should all continue to pay more for sugar.

That's not sweet; it's a sweetheart deal gone sour.

Go back, or read the latest opinions:

''On the Waterfront – Still''

John Fund, Wall Street Journal, 09/17/06