PUEBLA, Mexico - Negotiations came down to the wire late Friday, but the hemisphere's trade officials still failed to reach agreement in the latest round of talks aimed at coming up with a game plan for creating a Free Trade Area of the Americas.
''We've reached an impasse,'' said Martin Redrado, Argentina's deputy minister.
But he dodged a question from reporters as to whether the weeklong talks had failed.
''Trade relations are a process, not events,'' Redrado said. ``We have called for a new meeting.''
That next meeting is to be in Puebla the first week of March. But the failure to reach agreement here this week has put additional pressure on negotiators already under a tight deadline to reach agreement on the FTAA by year-end.
While noting that the negotiators had not completed their work in Puebla, Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Peter Allgeier, said, ``We have made very substantial progress. I don't call it a failure because we haven't completed the meeting yet.''
Added Luiz Filipe Macedo Soares, the chief Brazilian trade negotiator: ``What is important to us is to assure that the FTAA is really an accord about free trade.''
The deputy trade ministers from 34 of the hemisphere's 35 nations (all but Cuba) entered their final and most contentious session more than four hours after they'd been scheduled to wrap up the negotiations in this colonial city southwest of Mexico City.
But they failed to reach consensus on how to handle agricultural trade, and a number of other quarrelsome issues went unnegotiated.
They had met here since Monday, trying to come up with a negotiating map for the less comprehensive FTAA plan that emerged when the regional trade ministers met in Miami last November.
They made some progress, managing to finesse the wording on a U.S.-led proposal from 14 nations that had drawn the ire of Brazil and its Mercosur neighbors, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.
In addition, the trade ministers were able to remove a major stumbling block to reaching an accord by putting negotiations for all tariff eliminations on the table.
But, by late Friday, the U.S.-led bloc and the Mercosur countries were still split over agricultural trade. Mercosur was demanding that the United States and Canada neutralize the ''trade-distorting'' effect of domestic agricultural price supports and export credits.
''We are being very realistic,'' Redrado said. ``We are not asking for the moon.''
He said one way for the United States to do this would be to offer to remove tariffs on such farm products as beef, soybeans and dairy, which have large price supports, when the agreement goes into effect.
The United States has insisted that its agricultural subsidies, from export credits to price supports, must be negotiated in the context of world trade talks because subsidies are a global, not regional, issue.
The negotiators at this round of talks also failed to finalize procedures for smaller groups of countries that want to sign agreements on such nontrade issues as investment rules, services access, government procurement and competition policy.
These issues are key for U.S. companies seeking treaties that would make doing business globally that much easier for multinationals.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. NoNonsense English offers this material non-commercially for research and educational purposes. I believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, i.e. the media service or newspaper which first published the article online and which is indicated at the top of the article unless otherwise specified.