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REPORTS: AMERICAS |
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Saturday 22
November
2003
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FTAA Goes 'Lite' But U.S. Still Trade
Heavyweight
By Emad Mekay
MIAMI, (IPS) - The scaled down
plan given the nod at the end of a
meeting here Thursday on a proposed
pan-American common market marks a U.S.
retreat on its ambitious trade policies
in the western hemisphere but
Washington's new aggressive push for
bilateral deals could be a greater
threat to the region's developing
countries.
Trade ministers from the 34 Americas
nations (minus Cuba) who assembled to
forge ahead with the Free Trade Area of
the Americas (FTAA) wrapped up talks one
day ahead of schedule with a far less
comprehensive draft agreement than
originally envisioned -- now dubbed
”FTAA lite”.
When proposed in 1994, the FTAA was
designed as a trading bloc that would
encompass 800 million people and stretch
from Alaska to the southern tip of South
America, joining economies with a
combined output of nearly 14 trillion
dollars a year. The deadline for
creating such a bloc is January 2005.
But analysts say the weeklong eighth
ministerial meeting here barely managed
to dodge a resounding collapse of the
controversial talks that would have
echoed September's breakdown of
negotiations at the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) in Cancun, Mexico.
In Miami, negotiators also tiptoed
around dealing with controversial issues
such as intellectual property rights,
rules protecting foreign investment and
government purchases.
The watered down blueprint for the trade
area now allows member countries to pick
and choose which obligations they will
commit to rather than having to sign on
to an all-embracing pact.
”The FTAA is in such a state of crisis
that at the Miami Ministerial the U.S.
was forced to choose between no FTAA and
FTAA-lite,” said Lori M. Wallach,
director of Global Trade Watch for
non-governmental organisation (NGO)
Public Citizen.
”All that was agreed was to scale back
the FTAA's scope and put all of the hard
decisions to an undefined future venue
so as to not make Miami the Waterloo of
FTAA,” she added in a statement Friday.
As officials from the office of the U.S.
trade representative continued Friday to
insist the meeting was a success,
economists said its outcome will
certainly exasperate anxious U.S.
business executives who are pushing to
open up Latin American markets to their
products in a single strike, and
buttress civil society groups and unions
that opposed the deal from the onset.
”U.S. negotiators may try to put a happy
face on the Miami talks, but the 'FTAA
lite' deal will not please the big
business lobby that has been the driving
force behind the proposed trade pact,”
said Sarah Anderson of the Institute for
Policy Studies in Washington.
”By allowing countries to opt out of
obligations on investment and other
contentious issues, U.S. negotiators
have dashed the Fortune 500's hopes of
gaining new investment opportunities and
protections in Brazil, South America's
largest economy,” she added Friday.
But the National Association of
Manufacturers, a powerful U.S. business
group, was more upbeat. In a statement
the association said Thursday's outcome
avoided having ”the door slam shut, and
gives us a chance for what can still be
a very high quality agreement''.
Critics of the proposed FTAA say it
threatens public health, the environment
and workers' rights by giving
overwhelming powers to large
corporations and by pushing a sell-off
of essential public services like health
care, education and water.
They also argue the agreement could
force the less developed Latin American
and Caribbean countries to accept
provisions giving special rights to
foreign investors, mostly from the
United States and Canada, wishing to
challenge domestic policies.
While forcing changes to the FTAA might
be seen as a success by some developing
countries, like Brazil, which oppose a
sweeping one-size-fits-all agreement,
this week's meeting also marked the
official birth of a more forceful U.S.
strategy of bilateral trade talks --
potentially more dangerous for the
economies of developing nations.
In Miami, U.S. officials unveiled plans
to hold talks with four Andean countries
-- Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia
-- and with Panama and the Dominican
Republic. Washington also said it would
start talks with Uruguay over a
bilateral investment treaty early next
year.
”Unfortunately, the U.S. has violated
the spirit of the ministerial
declaration by undertaking a strategy of
negotiating bilateral and mini-regional
agreements containing exactly the
horrific proposals on intellectual
property, investment and other areas
that the U.S. has failed to ram through
in the FTAA,” said Robert Weissman,
co-director of Essential Action, a
Washington-based organisation that
campaigns for health rights, in a
statement Friday.
Smaller countries negotiating deals with
Washington will be left without the
support and protection of informal blocs
of like-minded nations, add many
observers.
”Left to fend for themselves, many fear
that small countries will be so much
chum for the sharks,” Eric Dannenmaier
of the Tulane Institute for
Environmental Law and Policy at Tulane
Law School in New Orleans told media in
Miami.
Yet, even with the spectre of bilateral
agreements lurking over Miami, some
activists attributed the shift in U.S.
policy away from a comprehensive FTAA to
campaigning by civil society groups and
NGOs, many of which were here, either
protesting on the streets or holding
non-violent actions.
”The (U.S. President) Bush trade team
has gone to plan B for bi-lateral,
forced to abandon negotiation for the
FTAA as a whole because of Latin
American nations' opposition and the
peoples' resistance across the
hemisphere,” said Sara DeSantis, an
organic farmer and activist with
Stopftaa.org.
Wallach predicted that the future of the
modified FTAA might not be any brighter
than the original plan, as social
movements in many FTAA-target countries
are gaining strength. Those groups will
also fight bilateral deals, she added.
There is a real possibility, Wallach
said, that elections occurring before
the FTAA deadline of Jan. 1, 2005 in
several countries could add to the
growing bloc of nations who will either
have to represent their public's
interests at the FTAA table or face
electoral or governing crises.
”Our goal is to replace it (FTAA)
altogether, not allow for its expansion
either through a watered down FTAA or
via bilaterals,” she added.
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