Published: Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Bush's administration's FTAA
hemispheric commerce initiative "is dead"! Merco Press Agency: A top Argentine trade official was quoted in Buenos. Aires as
saying the Free Trade Area of the Americas, or FTAA, a hemispheric commerce
initiative pushed by the Bush administration, "is dead." Carlos Alvarez, a high-level official in the Southern Cone
Common Market, or Mercosur, trade bloc's permanent secretariat, said "the FTAA
is dead because it implies an asymmetrical model of negotiations between north
and south." Alvarez was referring to the opposition that the
FTAA has encountered from Mercosur's members. Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest exporter of
crude oil, recently signed its accession agreement and expects to phase in all
membership requirements by 2010. "Unlike other times when there was a greater dependency on
the dominant power, the current period is one of having development strategies
that will allow the (South American trade) bloc to operate with greater
autonomy," Alvarez said. He defended Mercosur's decision to back Venezuela's
candidacy for one of the rotating seats on the UN Security Council for the
2007-2008 period. "It's not the same Mercosur of the 1990s, essentially trade,
as the one today, where they talk about productive development, social and in
the energy" area, Alvarez said. Mercosur, one of the world's largest trade
blocs, has more than 210 million consumers. Since the founding in 1991 of Mercosur in the central
Argentine city of Cordoba, trade within the bloc has surged from $4.12 billion
to nearly $21.11 billion, while the region's gross domestic product, or GDP,
climbed from $650 billion to $990 billion, and direct foreign investment soared
from $2.6 billion to $20.24 billion. Brazil and Argentina, the two largest economies
in the trade bloc, account for some 97% of the regional GDP, according to
economists. Some 97% of trade within the bloc
is also dominated by Argentina and
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