Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 7 • Number 40 • 26th November 2003

FTAA Ministerial Leaves Future Wide Open; Us Moves Toward New Bilaterals

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The eighth Ministerial meeting of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) wrapped up early on 20 November with the adoption of a Declaration that by all accounts avoided tough decisions and left many options on the table. The Ministerial followed lower-level talks between the 34 future FTAA parties (see BRIDGES Weekly, 19 November 2003), and saw particularly tough negotiations between FTAA co-chairs Brazil and the US. As delegates failed to broach their wide differences, they chose to adopt a broad and vague declaration in order to prevent a failure — such as the breakdown of WTO negotiations in Cancun in September — and keep the talks alive.

Ministerial Declaration outlines flexibilities

The FTAA Ministerial Declaration adopts a two-tiered approach, allowing each country the flexibility to decide its level of commitment according to its needs, objectives and specific capacities. Originally, the US had argued for a comprehensive agreement, while Brazil preferred leaving out commitments in certain sensitive areas, such as intellectual property rights, investment or services. The US continued to be unwilling to negotiate in the area of agriculture, a key concern to Brazil and many other FTAA parties.

The Declaration notes that the FTAA will cover measures in each negotiating discipline, as well as horizontal measures, taking into account the different levels of development and the size of the economies of the parties involved. However, it does not set the level of commitment that will be adopted. Much will depend on the level of participants’ ambition, and the Agreement’s exact scope will not be clear before the conclusion of the FTAA negotiations.

In their reactions to the Declaration, some countries that already have free trade agreements with the US — such as Mexico, Canada, Chile and Costa Rica — called for ambitious commitments in all negotiating areas. The Caribbean countries mainly called for specific horizontal provisions on special and differential treatment.

Observers, especially from the business sector, questioned whether such a Declaration really was all that could be reaped from nine years of effort. Many also wondered how the negotiations had moved away from their original aim of a ’single undertaking’ in just a few days.

Transparency and civil society participation

Concerns over a lack of transparency have been raised repeatedly during the nine years of FTAA negotiations. The ministers in Miami, aware of the need for improvement, dedicated two paragraphs of the Declaration to this issue, including a decision to release the third draft of the FTAA chapters to the public.

They also committed themselves to increasing civil society participation in the FTAA process and to enhancing communication. They instructed the Committee on Government Representatives on the Participation of Civil Society (GRPCS Committee) to make recommendations to the FTAA Trade Negotiations Committee (TNC) for expanding information dissemination.

While the FTAA meeting did not see the wide protests that had accompanied earlier free trade meetings — most notably the WTO Ministerial in Seattle in 1999 — a number of organisations mobilised in Miami. A protest march on 20 November united union members, environmentalists and religious and human rights activists from across the entire Americas region. The activists also organised a Workers’ Forum and a People’s Gala celebrating the cultures of the Americas.

A wide range of civil society groups also met under the auspices of the Americas Business Forum (ABF) and the Americas Forum on Trade and Sustainable Development (AFTSD), holding seminars, dialogues and debates.

US goes bilateral with "will do" countries

In conjunction with the FTAA meeting, the US announced that it would start to negotiate free trade deals with Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Panama. It also said it would include the Dominican Republic within the ongoing Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) negotiations.

Secretary General of the Organisation of American States (OAS), Cesar Gaviria, expressed concern over this US strategy. He said these agreements would lead to a fragmentation among Southern countries, instead of contributing to hemispheric integration. He also stressed that the strategy would exclude many countries, which would lose the opportunities offered by trade liberalisation. The countries involved appeared less concerned, arguing that a significant number of bilateral agreements already existed in the region, and that these mechanisms would serve countries to be better prepared to reach more ambitious agreements in future.

Argentina noted that it was negotiating in seven different fora, and would continue to look for new negotiating opportunities. Argentina however also made it clear that its interests were linked to those of Brazil, and that the country would not negotiate the FTAA separately.

Next steps

The next step in the FTAA process — already underway for nine years — will involve a TNC meeting in February 2004. Much of the real work will have to be carried out in the TNC, as the vague Miami Declaration gives little in the way of clear guidance to negotiators.

For further information, see the BRIDGES Daily Updates produced in Miami, available at http://www.ictsd.org/issarea/Americas/FTAA_ministerial/miami/index.htm.

The Miami Ministerial Declaration is available at http://www.ftaa-alca.org/Ministerials/Miami/declaration_e.asp.

ICTSD reporting; "Environment Sidelined In FTAA Draft Agreement," ENS, 20 November 2003.

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