The Final Cog: Part Eleven - The Central Eastern Corridor

The central eastern region has two trade corridors, one urban, which passes through the largest North American cities and the industrial basins of the central eastern region, and another which is rural and which passes through the Great Plains in the U.S. and through the Canadian Prairies.

The urban corridor of NAFTA brings half of the North American population to within a single day’s journey by highway between Montréal, Canada, and Mexico. The corridor passes through the industrial stronghold of Canada and its largest market. It enters the United States at Port Huron and at Windsor, where it crosses the Ambassador bridge, the busiest bridge in North America, to join Detroit, Michigan, where the giants of the automobile industry are located. In the United States, the urban corridor follows “Corridor 18”, which extends to the lower Rio Grande valley in Texas, through Indianapolis, Indiana and Memphis, Tennessee.

The second corridor includes the Great Plains: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas; and the Canadian Prairie provinces: Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta. A certain number of associations have been formed following the creation of NAFTA, in order to revitalize the rural communities of the central eastern region, by taking advantage of the transcontinental trade flows. The Central North American Trade Corridor Association, The Northern Great Plains Initiative, the Ports-to-Plains Trade Corridor an the Mid-Continent Trade Corridor are networks of business people, civil organizations and government agencies aiming to foster growth and employment in the central eastern region by means of a direct transcontinental link between Canada, the United States and Mexico. A network of cities, the North American International Trade Corridor Partnership (NAITCP), aims to build a huge regional market by holding regular trilateral meetings between member cities, and by facilitating contact between businesses in the corridor. In particular, the NAITCP has put together a huge directory of enterprises in the corridor, which may be consulted on-line, and organizes virtual trade missions.

Information obtained from the North American Forum on Integration website.

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