MIAMI (Reuters) - With prospects for an Americas-wide free-trade pact up in the air, the United States pushed ahead on Tuesday with plans for more ambitious bilateral agreements with individual countries in South America, Central America and the Caribbean.
As trade officials from 34 countries of the Western Hemisphere -- all except Cuba -- continued to debate how to structure the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick announced plans to begin new trade talks with Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia. He was also expected to announce with Panama later on Tuesday.
The United States already hopes to complete a free trade pact with five Central American countries this year and to begin talks with the Dominican Republic early in 2004.
Until recently, the United States and Brazil have been at odds over the scope of the FTAA, with the United States supporting a much more comprehensive agreement covering areas such as services, patent and copyright protections, investment and government procurement in addition to tariff cuts.
But a "vision" statement crafted by Zoellick and Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim as part of a draft declaration for this week's FTAA meeting in Miami appears to lean heavily toward Brazil's position by allowing countries to opt out of certain parts of the agreement.
The language has raised concerns with countries like Canada, Chile and Mexico, which already have comprehensive free trade agreements with the United States and want all countries in the hemisphere to be required to play by the same rules.
Richard Bernal, chief negotiator for Caribbean nations, said however, "We haven't yet gotten to specifics ... Nothing has been taken off the table yet."
He also told reporters work on the draft declaration would be about "90 percent finished" by the end of Tuesday.
U.S. business groups fear the Amorim-Zoellick text could gut the FTAA by allowing Brazil -- the largest economy in Latin America -- to skip out on key parts of the pact.
"I don't see how it works," Frank Vargo, vice president for international trade affairs at the National Association of Manufacturers. "There is a point -- I don't know where it is -- where we would say walk away from the FTAA and do the bilats."
The United States has far more leverage in bilateral negotiations than in the FTAA. But the downside to multiple agreements is they create a web of different trade rules that could be much more costly for companies to comply with than a single hemisphere-wide pact.
Bernal played down the significance of bilateral agreements and pacts such as the one expected between the United States and some Central and South American nations. He said the Caribbean was still pushing for a full FTAA deal, but that regional agreements, such as Caricom, create regimes that are more easily built into broader multilateral agreements.
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