LexisNexis(TM) Academic - Document

LexisNexis(TM) Academic - DocumentCopyright 2005 The Financial Times Limited
Financial Times (London, England)

January 26, 2005 Wednesday
USA Edition 1

SECTION: LATIN AMERICA; Pg. 9

LENGTH: 392 words

HEADLINE: US and Brazil to discuss resuming talks on Americas free trade bloc

BYLINE: By RAYMOND COLITT

DATELINE: BRASILIA

BODY:


Brazilian and US officials will discuss relaunching the stalled negotiations towards a Free Trade Area of the Americas when they meet this week at the World Economic Forum.

Celso Amorim, Brazil's foreign minister, and Robert Zoellick, the outgoing US trade representative, will meet on the sidelines of the forum in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss regional and multilateral trade negotiations.

FTAA talks ground to a halt last year as the region's leading trade partners turned their attention towards agriculture talks at the World Trade Organisation. "Had we (all) spent as much time on the FTAA as we did on the WTO, we might have had more substantial progress," Mr Amorim told the Financial Times yesterday.

Market access proposals in FTAA talks had so far been "unsatisfactory", Mr Amorim said, but he also said he no longer saw "conceptual problems" with the negotiations.

The Brazilian government now proposes to focus talks on market access between the US and Mercosur, the four-nation South American trade bloc. "For us, the FTAA is about negotiations with the United States - the rest is just rhetoric," said Mr Amorim. The US has so far been hesitant to adopt the so-called "four-plus-one talks".

Yet Brasilia argues that it already has trade deals with all South American countries and is negotiating with Caribbean and Central American countries. In addition, Mr Amorim yesterday confirmed reports that Mercosur was looking to launch formal trade talks with Canada. "This could be a possible stepping stone towards the FTAA," he said.

The US has also been negotiating bilateral agreements with regional trade groups in Latin America.

Agreeing that both sides needed to make concessions, Mr Amorim suggested Mercosur was prepared to discuss market access to services and investments under current WTO regulations. Formal negotiations are likely to get under way only once a new US trade representative is named.

Yet Mr Amorim suggested that a new round of talks could benefit from Mr Zoellick's move to the US State Department, where he is tapped to become deputy secretary.

"Bob Zoellick will continue to have some influence, and he has interest - that's welcome. We have a very good understanding."

Meanwhile, an agreement between the European Union and Mercosur was "not very near yet", Mr Amorim said. Talks between both sides collapsed late last year.

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