MIAMI -(Dow Jones)- Canadian Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew said ministers from 34 countries might be ready to approve a new negotiating framework for an Americas-wide free trade pact on Thursday, one day before the summit is scheduled to end.
"I hope we will be able to end today," Pettigrew, who is participating in the negotiations, told reporters during a conference call.
He said negotiators have made "substantial" progress in narrowing differences on the road to a Free Trade Area of the Americas, which would create a common market stretching from Alaska to Patagonia.
"We believe we have an agreement," added Pettigrew.
Although consensus on a negotiating framework is near, governments still have a mountain of work ahead of them before clinching an actual free-trade pact.
The draft proposal calls for negotiations on market access - the nuts and bolts of any free trade accord - to be concluded by Sept. 30, 2004.
"All of us know how hard it will be to negotiate," U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick acknowledged earlier Thursday.
A spokeswoman for USTR, host of the talks in Miami, said she couldn't confirm whether the ministerial declaration would be issued later Thursday, instead of on Friday as originally planned.
Consensus for the new negotiating framework, which has been building in recent days, would allow governments to make basic commitments to free trade while granting them far greater flexibility in their level of participation.
A draft accord hammered out late Tuesday would require member nations to agree to a minimum set of rights and obligations spanning more than half-a-dozen areas that include market access, intellectual property rights and subsidies by January 2005, a decade after the talks were first launched.
The new framework also makes special concessions for smaller and less developed economies that can't open their markets as quickly, while permitting advanced economies to strike more ambitious bilateral or multilateral accords.
Negotiations screeched to a halt earlier this year when the U.S. refused to roll back its domestic farm subsidies during the multilateral talks and Brazil, Latin America's largest country, responded by pulling discussions on such issues as intellectual property rights and investment rules from the table.
Canada was one of a handful of countries, including Chile and Mexico, that had been lobbying hard in recent weeks not to water down the wording of the original framework.
But Pettigrew said his country can live with the new wording, even if it gives other governments the option of scaling back its commitments to truly open markets.
"We're proud of the progress we have made in recent days," he told reporters.
Countries such as the U.S. and Canada want lower import tariffs for their manufactured goods in Latin American markets, are pushing for governments to open up procurement contracts to foreign bidders and would like to see beefed-up rules to protect investor rights and patents on foreign soil, among other measures.
South American countries primarily want to sell more of their agricultural goods to the huge U.S. economy, which has protected its local farmers with a mix of subsidies, import tariffs and quotas. They also want the U.S. to roll back protections for local steel and textile industries, among other demands.
None of those issues has been tackled in Miami, according to trade officials involved in the talks, making for a very busy 2004.
-By Mike Esterl, Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-4026; mike.esterl@dowjones.com
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