Associate U.S. Trade Representative Peter Allgeier Visits FIU,
Says FTAA
Will Stay On Track In 2000

Since the Toronto Ministerial in November 1999, the FTAA negotiations have been on automatic pilot, taking a quiet back seat to the US political campaign.
This was the message conveyed by Peter Allgeier, Associate USTR for the Western Hemisphere, who visited the FIU campus on February 29, accompanied by Karen Lezny, USTR Director for the FTAA. Allgeier and Lezny were in Miami for the meeting of the Services Negotiating Group, whose chair Allgeier has now assumed. The USTR officials took the opportunity to meet with a group of faculty, graduate students, and Latin American experts assembled by the FIU Summit of the Americas Center and the Academic Consortium to Follow the FTAA Negotiations, a group coordinated by FIU's Center for Labor Research and Studies and four Latin American research groups.

The USTR officials were confident that the Toronto negotiating mandate would carry USTR smoothly past the U.S. elections and produce a full set of FTAA texts for the next Administration to concentrate upon. But the very brief time between the January 20, 2001 U.S. Inauguration and the Buenos Aires Trade Ministerial and the Quebec Summit in April of that year will force an intensive Hemispheric trade policy development agenda on the new U.S. government.

The Toronto Ministerial concluded by instructing the negotiating groups to prepare written bracketed texts in time for the next trade ministers meeting in Buenos Aires in April 2001. In so doing, the trade ministers consciously assigned the working groups a task that carries the process through the U.S. election and beyond. Allgeier believes that these texts will be ready for review by governments by November of 2000. This will ensure productive activity through the US election period and on into the first months of the new Administration and Congress. However, it doesn't mean that ongoing problematic issues are being solved or that new controversies won't appear as the texts are prepared.

One hopefully transitory problem is the need to sort out overlapping issues now being discussed in more than one negotiating group. The Vice Ministers will take note of this situation at the April 2000 meeting of the Trade Negotiating Committee (TNC) in Guatemala, and the countries will have to decide in which "chapter" to include several issues that currently appear in the texts of various negotiating groups. In addition, the ability to move the negotiations is complicated by the luke-warm attitudes toward the FTAA of Mexico and Brazil, each of which seeks to preserve its current trade position and take advantage of the undeclared trade war between the US and Europe.

Asked about the practicality of the "single undertaking" approach, in which all countries are mandated to collaborate to produce a single agreed final text, Allgeier stressed the need to deal practically with the various degrees of asymmetry of the nations involved. He expressed hope that by varying the time lapses allowed before full application of the treaty's norms for certain countries, as well as providing training and technical assistance, the negotiators will be able to agree on a single undertaking. Many countries would disagree and desire permanent concessions. It will be difficult to assess who deserves what, since one size doesn't fit all, especially in the case of the "small economies."

Perhaps the most controversy involves two FTAA advisory committees that are not formally part of the negotiations, the Committee on Civil Society Participation as well as the Committee on Small Economies. Allgeier expects that another round of comments on civil society will be approved at the late March meeting of the Committee on Civil Society Participation in Miami. The FIU participants expressed their understanding that most NGOs and labor organizations remain unwilling to consider that Committee as a useful channel and would like more direct access to the actual negotiations. Unfortunately, the Committee on Civil Society Participation does not appear to be considering new initiatives to gain greater transparency and accountability in the negotiations. Allgeier understands that the discussions with civil society must be more substantive, but he would like to see more participation from Latin America as well as more specific comments on trade issues in the next round of negotiations.