FTAA Trade Negotiations: A View of the Brazilian Co-chairmanship

Abstract

In 1998, Bahadian and Vieira Vargas (1998) alerted to the risks of excluding social issues from the integration effort as proposed in the Summit of the Americas, and of an excessive emphasis on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations alone, without considering the need to create a less asymmetric reality in the western hemisphere. Unfortunately, a decade after the publication of that article, divergences in regional trade negotiations have deepened. The FTAA remains far from becoming a real free trade area; instead of bringing together our countries’ economies, negotiations have revealed the persistence of protectionist measures both in traditional areas, such as agriculture, and in new areas, such as intellectual property rights. In this latter area, the attempt to create rules that go beyond those that have been negotiated in the World Trade Organization (WTO) could have highly negative impacts on developing countries—Brazil included—such as escalating the costs of social security and restraining access to generic drugs by poorer sectors of our societies.