Word: mercosur
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...negotiations. Brazil is scheduled to preside with the U.S. over FTAA trade meetings in 2003 and 2004, so Brazilian officials "don't want to see their position of leadership cut" by accelerating the process. Moreover, Brazil is intent on negotiating a trade deal between the European Union and the Mercosur trade group that it leads, "which it can then use as the basis for negotiating in the FTAA." On the other hand, Brazil's desire to complete a free-trade area in South America before joining the FTAA has been weakened by economic turmoil in the region, especially in Argentina...
...spread to Canada and Mexico, the U.S. partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement, but they are still evident. In South America, Argentina has been engulfed by a paralyzing financial crisis that threatens the cohesion and possibly the fate of the Southern Cone trading bloc known as Mercosur (which also includes Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay...
...Long-standing tensions and rivalries between NAFTA and Mercosur have blossomed into a behind-the-scenes tug-of-war over the summit agenda. There are major uncertainties about how the meeting chemistry will be affected by the interaction among newcomers like U.S. president George W. Bush, Mexican president Vicente Fox Quesada and the mercurial Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez Frías - alongside such veterans as the durable Jean Chrétien of Canada and Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso...
...Behind it all is a general frustration that the free-trade movement seems to be grinding against a wall of parochial interests epitomized by the growing distance between the two major economic associations, NAFTA and Mercosur. Much of the frustration is directed against the U.S., which has managed to conclude a recent trade agreement with China but has not formalized a single free-trade agreement in its own hemisphere since ratifying NAFTA in 1994. The stumbling blocks have included politically potent U.S. labor and agricultural lobbies that believe unrestrained tariff cutting will undermine the hard-fought gains in living standards...
...issues beyond the ken of most laypeople. And before the deals are reached - with four years to go before the FTAA deadline - uncertainty reigns. Hence the focus on disagreements, many of them vague and obscure, between the main regional trading blocs: NAFTA (total gross domestic product: $8.8 trillion) and Mercosur (total GDP: $1 trillion). The main anxiety is all too clear: fear of economic domination. In a hemispheric free-trade zone that includes the U.S., Canada and Mexico, predicts Josmar Verilla, vice president of the Brazilian Paper Producers Association, "we'll wind up in the meat grinder...