A dish going cold

The main reasons for the FTAA flagging is that both Brazil and the US continue to be far apart on several issues, including US protections for American farmers and Brazil’s laws covering the protection of intellectual property rights.

This country’s Trade and Industry Minister, Ken Valley also declared that he wasn’t sure whether there will be a hemispheric free trade zone that would stretch from Alaska to Argentina anytime soon.

" I think, quite frankly, it is now on a back burner and I feel moreso when I was told that the chief negotiator for the US was appointed as deputy to Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State," said Valley, referring to United States Trade Representative (USTR) and chief negotiatior Robert Zoellick.

He also alluded to the bilateral trade agreements that the US continue to pursue with FTAA member countries.

The FTAA process was dealt more serious blows last week as Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva admitted that the issue has been "off the agenda" for the last two years as Brazil strengthens its own relations with Latin American neighbours and with the Mercosur trade bloc made up of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.

"For two years, FTAA has not been discussed in Brazil, because we took it off the agenda," Silva said. "How did we take it off the agenda? By strengthening Mercosur, creating the South American community of nations and trying to establish a new standard of relations between South American countries," the Brazilian leader said.

Last month, a report published by the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) — an investigative arm of Congress — blames both the US and Brazil for the impasse in the troubled talks on the FTAA, whose aims are to progressively eliminate barriers to trade and investment.

US Trade Deals

Trade deals with the United States are also being aggressively sought after by countries as the preferred approach for engaging the US market as there are no signs of a FTAA in sight.

Director-General of the RNM, Ambassador Dr Richard Bernal said the report presents a balanced summary of the views expressed by a variety of officials of FTAA negotiating countries and should lead to the resumption of negotiations.

"It is now up to the FTAA Co-Chairs (US and Brazil) to find ways to address and overcome the fundamental problems in the FTAA process highlighted in the GAO Report, if there is to be a successful resumption of FTAA negotiations," said Ambassador Bernal.

But the US has also been placing priority on the successful passage of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) through Congress in the first quarter of 2005. Members of the Andean Community and Panama are also pursuing bilateral negotiations with the United States. The slow progress of the FTAA is also dealing a blow to Trinidad and Tobago, considered the front-runner to host the FTAA Secretariat in Port-of-Spain, particularly as millions of taxpayers dollars have been pumped into a hemispheric wide campaign to lobby support for the CARICOM bid.

The lobbying has paid off since Trinidad and Tobago is already guaranteed of at least 18 votes but the hanging question is whether Port-of-Spain will ever see the permanent establishment of the FTAA secretariat, given the stalled negotiations.

In order to resolve mounting differences between the US and Brazil, Ministers at the November 2003 FTAA ministerial in Miami agreed to shift the FTAA negotiating framework from pursuing a "one size fits all" agreement to a more flexible agreement.

This was dubbed "FTAA lite" by critics — consisting of a single set of trade rights and obligations for all nine areas that would apply to all 34 member countries and additional rights and commitments for those countries that wish to adopt them.

"However, the agreement reached in Miami has not resolved the impasse and negotiations among the 34 nations have been suspended since early 2004. As a result, key milestones for progress have been missed, and the scheduled conclusion of the FTAA negotiations in January 2005 passed without an agreement," according to the GAO report.

GAO’s findings on the FTAA did not receive favourable comments from the Office of the US Trade Representative which disagreed with the report, stating that it is an inaccurate and poorly framed portrayal of progress and problems in the negotiations, overemphasised the role of the United States and Brazil in the current impasse and did not give sufficient weight to US efforts to make progress in the talks.

ALBA COMING

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s President Fidel Castro, Washington’s "bad boys" have been poking fun at the US, describing the FTAA as a US plan to dominate Latin America and plunder its resources through multinational companies.

"We must congratulate Condoleezza Rice for the death of the FTAA. The FTAA is dead, the ALBA is coming," declared Castro, promoting Chavez’s Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA, also Spanish for dawn).

With the fundamental problems facing the stalled negotiations — nothing less than a miracle is needed for both Brazil and the US to get it back on the negotiating table and take the lead, if there is to be an FTAA.