Word: nafta
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...atmospherics as the summit approached seemed to support that view: the hemisphere resembled a checkerboard of multiplying trade quarrels. Just two weeks ago, despite their intimate NAFTA partnership, Canada and the U.S. moved to the verge of a multibillion-dollar trade war over softwood lumber; it came not long after a bruising spat between Canada and Brazil that involved subsidies to airline sales and, briefly, a shutdown in the beef trade. Brazil was in a row with the U.S. over the pricing of generic aids drugs that added another thorn to a perennially prickly relationship...
...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...
...still lies ahead on a bewildering array of 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...
...Brazil already dominates its own Mercosur trading bloc, but it is smaller, weaker and much less sweeping in its free-trade arrangements than NAFTA. Accommodating to proposed FTAA rules that are similar to NAFTA's - the draft text mirrors the NAFTA agreement - is therefore seen as threatening. "Rightly or wrongly, the perception that much is expected from our side while little is offered in exchange is indeed widespread," Brazilian foreign minister Celso Lafer declared in Washington last month...