Brazil and the United States are exploring ways to breathe life into moribund talks designed to forge a free-trade region covering the Americas, senior U.S. and Brazilian officials said on Sunday.
“They are certainly not dead,” U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said, referring to negotiations on the Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA, an accord that would tear down trade barriers among every country in the Western Hemisphere except Cuba.
Zoellick met Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim earlier in the day in the Swiss ski resort of Davos in an effort to find common ground for the talks, which have been stalled for more than a year.
“We explored avenues that would let us relaunch the FTAA process rather early,” Amorim told reporters after the meeting.
The region has already failed to meet a Jan. 1 deadline set a decade ago for finishing the talks.
The United States and Brazil are co-chairs of the FTAA negotiations but have had vastly different views of what the final agreement should look like. Washington has pushed for a comprehensive pact, balking at demands to put its domestic farm subsidies on the block.
Critics in both countries fear the FTAA would mean the loss of jobs and a rise of corporate power they associated with the North American Free Trade Area, which groups Canada, Mexico and the United States.
Brazilian firms feared more competitive U.S. rivals. U.S. farmers feared more competitive Brazilian farmers.
Doha trade round
Meeting separately in Davos the day before, 26 ministers from developing and wealthy industrialized states agreed to intensify the political firepower devoted to modernizing global trade rules at the World Trade Organization.
On Sunday, eight of those ministers plus the head of the World Trade Organization met again to continue informal consultations.
Leaving the second day of talks, Keynan Trade Minister Mukhisa Kituyi said negotiators had still not paid sufficient attention to developing country concerns, raising the specter of discontent ahead of another informal meeting planned in five weeks.
“Development, definitely, has to return to the Doha agenda,” Kituyi said.
Launched in Doha, Qatar in 2001, the current round of talks is aimed at using trade as a tool for poor countries to lift themselves out of poverty.
Responding to Kituyi’s concerns, WTO chief Supachai Panitchpakdi acknowledged that there was no movement forward in at least one area of special concern to developing countries and called on negotiators to strike a balance.
“Development concerns will be permeating throughout the whole range of negotiations,” Supachai said.
