FTAA not an easy task for Americas

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Tuesday, January 13, 2004

FTAA not an easy task for Americas

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The United States is trying hard to push a free trade pact in the two-day summit of the Americas in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey on Jan 12-13, but its efforts met strong resistance from many Latin American nations.

The United States wants the two-day Special Summit's draft document to call for re-emphasizing a 2005 deadline for finishing negotiations on a Free Trade Area of Americas (FTAA). But Brazil and Venezuela and many other Latin American nations do not. Brazilhas led the opposition to the United States within the FTAA.

At last Summit of the Americas in 2001 in Quebec, Canada, leaders of 34 American nations agreed to put the FTAA into practice by January 2005, but negotiations on the FTAA process have not been successful. The United States and Brazil, the two largest countries in the continent, are divided on many issues.

Brazil and some other Latin American nations want to put the issue of agriculture in the negotiation, but the United States does not. Instead, it wants to put issues of investment, the development of service into the negotiation.

Brazil and other developing American nations are openly against the deadline for the FTAA in January 2005 as they believe the developing nations of the continent need more time to discuss the free trade pact under which all the nations in the continent should open they market.

The southern Americas insist that the interests and competitiveness of smaller nations should be given more attention in the process of free trade negotiations so as to achieve a balanced development in the continent. If these demands are ignored, the FTAA will be meaningless for them.

Observers here said the free trade pact -- initially conceived as an ambitious, comprehensive pact that would unite all the 34 countries with common rules and procedures -- now has been pared back to avert a US-Brazilian clash. What is left is a proposed agreement, widely referred to as "FTAA lite," which would allow countries to pick and choose how much trade liberalization they want.

Worried about bigger US influence in the region, Latin American nations insist that the two-day summit stick to the issues it was originally called to discuss -- poverty, economic and social development and democracy.

A Latin American delegate said on Sunday that as the summit is about reducing poverty and strengthening democracy, the delegates should not allow it to lose that focus. Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela are leading the opposition to making trade talks a central part of the summit agenda.

At a press conference here on Sunday, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin and Mexican President Vicente Fox expressed doubts that they can set up a massive free trade zone by next year. They called the proposal of creating the FTAA by Jan. 1, 2005 "a bit optimistic" if not outright unrealistic.

However, they hoped that the 34 countries should keep working to tackle contentious disputes such as agricultural subsidies in order to set up the largest free trade region in the world.

Source: Xinhua

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