Miami (USA), November 20, 2003 (Agência Brasil - ABr) - The Brazilian proposal for a flexible agenda in negotiations over the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) will serve as a basis for the VIII Ministerial Meeting to discuss the formation of the bloc. The event begins today at 9 A.M. (noon in Brasília), in the Intercontinental Hotel, with the presence of Ministers from 34 countries in the Americas.
The four articles of the text prepared two weeks ago by the Minister of Foreign Relations, Celso Amorim, and the Trade Representative of the United States, Robert Zoellick, were maintained intact at the vice-Ministers' meeting, which precedes the Ministers' Meeting. According to Amorim, the fact that the document does not deal in depth with the most controversial issues does not mean depriving the FTAA of substance, but, rather, adopting an agenda that makes it possible to move towards creating the bloc in 2005. "There is a perfect understanding of what it is possible to obtain here. And what is possible is not necessarily of little account, because it is a mandate to continue to negotiate in a spirit of flexibility and balance," he said.
The document, which, according to Amorim, should be ratified by the Ministers at the meeting which ends tomorrow, treats with broad strokes the nine themes under study - concentrating on the areas of access to markets, agriculture, government purchases, intellectual property rights, subsidies, anti-dumping laws, services, defense of competition, and investments - and leaves more complex themes for future negotiations.
Thus, the opening of markets is guaranteed, with reductions in and even the elimination of import tariffs and other barriers, while other, more sensitive aspects will be discussed outside the context of the FTAA, in plurilateral agreements. "We shall try to obtain the maximum within the FTAA, but, when that is not possible, we shall do it through plurilateral agreements," he explained.
The Chancellor defended the plurilateral agreements as a "polygamous marriage," in which the more relations a country has, the better it is for free trade, and he affirmed that this possibility is not detrimental to the bloc.
The proposal for a more flexible agenda harks back to the idea defended by Amorim at the beginning of the year, when it was said that "three tracks" are possible for trade discussions among countries. The first would be the FTAA itself, with more open clauses, emphasizing the opening of markets. The second forum would be the World Trade Organization (WTO), where rules would be discussed covering more complicated issues, such as subsidies, anti-dumping policies, and intellectual property. For Amorim, "this is a step ahead, allowing us to avoid impasses that were beginning to loom." (DAS)
