WASHINGTON - Trade ministers from the United States and 13 other nations in the hemisphere reported no breakthroughs Friday after two days of informal discussions aimed at re-energizing negotiations to create the world's largest free trade zone.
While U.S. officials said the trade ministers remained committed to achieving a January 2005 deadline for completing a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, other nations expressed reservations that the deadline can be met given the wide remaining differences.
Brazil, Argentina and other Latin American countries have complained that the Bush administration is refusing to make adequate offers to lower U.S. trade barriers in such politically sensitive areas as citrus and other farm products, steel, textiles and other manufactured goods.
The meeting, called by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, included officials from 13 other nations including Brazil, which co-chairs the FTAA talks with the United States.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorin told reporters late Friday the discussions had been an opportunity to give trade negotiators a chance to review their positions.
"We got a vision about the possibility to continue on a realistic track, leaving sensitive things to be discussed under the (World Trade Organization) umbrellas or another scenario," Amorin said.
Brazil wants the talks proceed on three tracks — the FTAA negotiations, global trade liberalization talks under the WTO and a bilateral free trade deal among the United States and the four countries of the Mercosur trade bloc — Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.
The Bush administration has emphasized its goal of getting a comprehensive free trade agreement under the FTAA and using that deal as leverage to achieve greater reductions of trade barriers in the World Trade Organization negotiations.
Luis Alberto Castiglioni, Paraguay's vice president-elect, told reporters Friday that meeting the January 2005 deadline for completing the FTAA talks would be "very hard."
He too urged the United States to consider moving some of the issues to the WTO negotiations and opening up separate free trade talks with the Mercosur countries given that the United States already is pursuing a large number of individual free trade deals.
"We would like to see an inclusive United States, not an exclusive one; a country that can be a partner with all countries, not only with a few," Castiglioni said.
A senior U.S. trade official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said the discussions had been informal with no effort to reach agreement on any of the contentious issues.
"There was a very frank and candid discussion among the ministers on where they feel we are now and where we need to be in January 2005," the U.S. official said.
The official said the next actual negotiating session will occur when deputy trade ministers meet July 7-11 in El Salvador. All the discussions are to prepare for a meeting of trade ministers in Miami at the end of November.
Antitrade critics have complained that more than half the 34 countries in the FTAA negotiations were excluded from this week's gathering, and they said the decision to hold the talks at a remote conference center 70 miles from Washington in Wye River, Md., was designed to limit news coverage.
Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said America's huge trade deficits provided evidence that the administration's free trade policies were a failure.
"Every month we get numbers that confirm additional job losses, the decline of our manufacturing base and our growing reliance on goods produced in other countries," Brown said.
Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez told reporters Friday that it would be important for the countries in the FTAA negotiations to "work out a clear agenda. That is to pick up issues that would be discussed under the FTAA umbrella and those to be treated under the WTO so that we can move in both tracks in a parallel fashion."
In addition to Brazil, countries involved in the talks this week were Canada, Mexico, El Salvador, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay.
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