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 Business News | November 2005 
Mexico to Push for Reviving FTAA Talks
 AP
| | Bret Leraul, left, of San Francisco, and Ana Cial, of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, rally against the Bush administration during a demonstration sponsored by The World Can't Wait in New York's Union Square Park, Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer) |
Mexico City - Mexican President Vicente Fox will ask his counterparts at the Americas Summit in Argentina to set a date to relaunch negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a Mexican official said Wednesday.
Yanerit Morgan Sotomayor, a top official at the Foreign Relations Department, said Mexico would try to revive negotiations for the hemisphere-wide free trade accord, or at least "maintain the process to continue negotiations."
The effort to create a so-called FTAA, which would include every country in the Western Hemisphere except Cuba, has been stalled as Brazil and the United States bicker over U.S. protections for American farmers and Brazil's laws covering the protection of intellectual property rights.
Negotiatiors have already missed an original January 2005 deadline for wrapping up the talks, despite a watered-down two-tier approach that has been dubbed "FTAA lite" by critics.
Sotomayor said Mexico would like to see negotiations reactivated early next year, at the latest.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has vowed, along with thousands of anti-free trade protesters in Argentina, to block any attempts to reactivate the FTAA.
Organization of American States Secretary-General Jose Miguel Insulza has said he believes it will be difficult to dive into FTAA negotiations until the next round of World Trade Organization talks have progressed.
The FTAA proposal initially came out of the first Americas Summit in 1994 in Miami.
Fox travels to Costa Rica on Wednesday before heading to Argentina. |
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