QUITO, Ecuador, Nov. 1 (UPI) -- U.S. trade officials were meeting with their counterparts from across the Americas Friday in an attempt to bolster support for a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas.
But the U.S. trade team is finding tough resistance and is making little headway among the 900 officials from 34 countries in attendance at the summit, with agricultural subsidies being the most divisive issue.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick tried to push attention away from the subsidy issue, pointing out that the European Union and Japan both have higher agricultural subsidy programs than the United States.
Argentina's Foreign Minister Carlos Ruckauf responded by saying the member countries of the South American trade bloc Mercosur -- and the rest of the Americas -- "are not negotiating to create the FTAA with the European Union nor with Japan."
Ruckauf and his colleagues from Brazil -- the leading countries of the struggling Mercosur, which also includes Uruguay and Paraguay -- are particularly concerned about what they see as the protectionist stance of the United States on agricultural goods.
The economies of both Argentina and Brazil, as well as most nations in the region, rely heavily on the export of raw agricultural goods, which face high tariffs to enter the United States.
Officials from both countries have loudly lamented the U.S. subsidy program for encouraging over-production, which they say floods the world market and drives prices down.
The FTAA is aimed at creating the largest free-trade zone in the world, which would stretch from Alaska to the tip of South America. U.S. officials were hopeful the meeting Friday would result in a clearer timeline of how the agreement, which they hope to finish by 2005, could proceed.
Greeting trade officials at the Quito meetings were thousands of protesters, mostly from indigenous, leftist and labor groups in Latin America.
Some 5,000 police officers were in the streets of Quito Friday to ensure safety, with another delegation numbering 50 surrounding the U.S. Embassy.
Police and protesters clashed on Thursday with 10 injuries reported. Local media reported the streets were calmer Friday.
Opposition to the FTAA has been gaining momentum of late, and the election of the leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to the presidency of Brazil -- Latin America's largest economy -- could slow negotiations substantially.
Lula -- as the Brazilian president-elect is known -- said while campaigning that the FTAA would be skewed to give greatest benefit to U.S. companies.
"I am a defender of free trade, but I want equality in the participation," he said before the election. "In the way that the FTAA has been proposed, the truth is that it isn't a policy of integration, it is a policy of political annexation."
Argentine human rights activist Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the Nobel Peace prize in 1980, rejected Friday the notion that Latin America stands to benefit from the proposed trade bloc.
"The FTAA is a new form of colonization of the continent because it would nearly make the industries of our countries disappear," Esquivel was quoted as saying in Ecuador's La Hora newspaper.
Brazilian Bishop Demetrio Valentino, an ardent opponent of the FTAA, said such an agreement would encompass the worst ideas from Washington.
"The FTAA would incorporate the most perverse of neo-liberalism: individualism and the sense of gain, without commiseration for the poor," he told the El Universo newspaper in Ecuador on Friday.
But backers of the FTAA say only through a greater opening in markets will the impoverished nations of Latin America make economic gains.
Many point out that the two most open economies in the region -- Mexico and Chile -- are also the most stable and prosperous.
Zoellick has said that should the FTAA talks stall, he is ready to pursue aggressively bilateral trade deals with Latin American nations. Such a deal is already in the works with Chile, and may be signed before the end of this year.
(Reported by Bradley Brooks, UPI business correspondent, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.)
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