MIAMI -(Dow Jones)- Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said Wednesday that he is pleased with a compromise agreement to kick-start stalled negotiations on a Free Trade Area of the Americas.
Trade officials from 34 countries in the hemisphere reached tentative agreement late Tuesday to revise a negotiating framework for the pan-American trade talks that allows individual countries to assume different levels of commitment to open trade.
"I think it's a victory in that allows us to move forward, so it's a victory for everyone," Amorim told reporters at a press conference in Miami.
The U.S. and Brazil, the two largest countries in the Americas, have been at loggerheads for months on the scope of an FTAA, which would group together 800 million people and $13 trillion in economic output.
A week-long ministerial summit in Miami, the eighth one since FTAA talks were first launched in late 1994, has been working since Saturday to try and resolve the impasse.
The U.S. refused earlier this year to roll back its agricultural subsidies program in the multilateral talks, and Brazil responded by taking such issues as intellectual property rights and investment rules off the negotiating table.
Those issues are back on the table as part of a draft agreement that would require all countries to agree to a basic set of commitments by January 2005 while giving them the option to negotiate further trade liberalization on a bilateral or plurilateral basis.
The hard work of negotiating the actual details, though, still hasn't been addressed.
"I don't have any delusions about how easy this is going to be. It's going to be difficult," acknowledged Amorim.
The reworked FTAA draft proposal, which still needs to be approved by foreign ministers before talks end on Friday, came on the heels of the U.S. announcing a number of bilateral trade initiatives earlier Tuesday involving Panama, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.
Some trade watchers said the bilateral moves were intended to isolate Brazil, which has been trying to forge a united South American front in talks with the U.S. to increase its negotiating heft.
Amorim said he wasn't worried about the U.S. bilateral initiatives, though, noting that the Mercosur trade bloc, which groups together Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, also is close to clinching several trade accords with Andean countries, the European Union and South Africa.
"I don't know how you apply this to other parts of life, but in trade, monogamy is definitely not a virtue," he told reporters.
Responding to a question, the minister reiterated that if Brazil were to enter direct free trade talks with the U.S., it would be as a member of Mercosur, not as a single country.
A U.S. trade official said no such talks with Brazil or Mercosur are scheduled outside of the FTAA.
- By Mike Esterl, Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-4026; mike.esterl@dowjones.com
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