Chicago Tribune | By James P. Miller | November 21, 2003
Top trade officials from 34 nations reached agreement Thursday on a framework for the planned Free Trade Area of the Americas, though the accord falls far short of the concrete plan that the meeting had originally been expected to yield.
The plan, which U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick called "a good couple of steps forward," will now be turned over to negotiators for more work, and FTAA authorities said they remain hopeful that a working accord can still be reached by the January 2005 deadline.
The effort to integrate all the economies of the Western Hemisphere except Cuba's has moved beyond "general concepts, from people talking past each other," Zoellick said, but "very important work lies ahead of us."
Although, he said, "I'm leaving Miami very satisfied with our progress," the document that emerged from the meeting has been referred to by some critical observers as "FTAA Lite."
That is because instead of establishing hard and fast rules that all member nations will be obliged to follow, it allows for a kind of buffet-style approach, in which member nations will be able to select the regulations they will or will not abide by.
Because of that less binding format, and because it pushes the resolution of many details further into the future, critics have suggested that the U.S. opted to water down its original vision of a free-trade hemisphere to come away with some kind of agreement that would allow officials to avoid the embarrassment of a full-scale collapse of the high-profile talks.
Such a setback would have been particularly unwelcome right now, following the collapse of crucial World Trade Organization talks in Cancun, Mexico, in September.
Those talks foundered because certain countries have grown angry at the U.S.'s unwillingness to cut politically popular agricultural subsidies. Such subsidies hurt farmers elsewhere in the world, because they allow U.S. farmers to sell their crops at unnaturally low prices, dealing an economic blow to small producers around the globe.
Brazil had led the WTO revolt, and in the wake of the Cancun failure, U.S. and Brazilian officials had sniped at each other for being inflexible. Earlier this month, however, the two nations joined forces to put forward the "opt-out" format that the ministers adopted Thursday.
While Zoellick contended that the U.S remains "very committed" to cutting the controversial subsidies in the future, the framework that came out of this week's meeting does not provide any specific mechanisms for addressing the divisive issue.
The first stage of the FTAA meetings began when midlevel negotiators started talks on Monday. On Wednesday, those officials approved a draft document that senior ministers were expected to fine-tune Thursday and Friday.
Although Zoellick, in his welcoming speech Thursday morning, had urged the top-level representatives to give the draft document "definition and focus," the ministers opted instead to essentially sign off on the framework they had been given.
As a result they unexpectedly finished their meeting Thursday evening, rather than Friday afternoon as expected.
The negotiators performed their work inside the heavily guarded Intercontinental Hotel. Because aggressive anti-globalization protesters have been active at free trade talks in recent years, Miami police mounted a mammoth show of force throughout the week.
The protests peaked Thursday, when an estimated 10,000 marchers walked peacefully through the city's sun-drenched streets.
Labor groups fear that pacts like NAFTA and the FTAA threaten workers' jobs and health.
"No More NAFTAs," read one sign. "People Before Profits," read another.
In addition to the tightly disciplined and largely older members of the AFL-CIO, which sponsored the march, there was a group of younger demonstrators with less formal affiliations--and fewer scruples about picking fights with law-enforcement officials.
A few hundred such protesters clashed openly with police before and after the union march, just blocks from the hotel where the trade talks were under way.
Police thwarted those sporadic conflicts by firing rubber bullets and using plastic shields, concussion grenades and stun guns to push back the crowd.
More than three dozen demonstrators were arrested, and 15 people were taken to the hospital for treatment, including three police officers.
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