Former President Bill Clinton, now a United Nations Special Envoy to earthquake ravished Haiti, acknowledged earlier this month that pushing free trade policies on developing nations was a mistake.

“I think it was a mistake,” he said, according to Voice of America. “I think it was part of a global trend that was wrong-headed.”

Clinton, who was key in pushing the North American Free Trade Agreement over the finish line in Congress during his presidency, negotiated tariff reductions in 1994 that opened Haiti’s agricultural sector up to highly subsidized U.S. imports.

The decision may have proved to be beneficial to American farmers, but it was devastating for the island nation that already had the distinction of being the poorest state in the Western Hemisphere.

Cheap U.S. imports of agricultural products were intended to speed up the process of industrialization, Clinton said.

“It is unrealistic to expect that a country can totally obliterate its capacity to feed itself and just skip a stage of development,” he says, according to Voice of America. “It seems almost laughable now that we ever thought it.”

Instead, the tariff reductions displaced countless peasant farmers who couldn‘t compete with the cheaper, subsidized imports, left millions highly susceptible to international price fluctuations in food staples, created an even higher level of food insecurity and generally left the nation’s people, two-thirds of whom rely on the agricultural sector, without the capacity to feed itself.

By 2005, 51 percent of all the food consumed in Haiti was imported, including 80 percent of the rice.

“It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake,” Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10. “I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else.”

Much the same scenario played out after the implementation of NAFTA. Millions of indigenous farmers were forced off their land as highly subsidized agricultural products flooded the market. By 2007, some 1.3 million Mexican farmers had lost their livelihoods, with many choosing to seek greener pastures in America, oftentimes illegally.

The failure of NAFTA could not be evidenced more clearly than through the influx of illegal immigrants that have entered the U.S. since 1993. Illegal immigrants in the U.S. have increased to 12 million today from 3.9 million in 1993, accounting for an overall increase of over 300 percent.

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