Como diria o Roberto Campos: o Brasil é um país que não perde a oportunidade de perder oportunidades, agora conjuntamente com os hermanos argentinos e bolivarianos. Vamos todos continuar soberanamente isolados das maiores correntes de comércio no hemisfério e no mundo...
Assim é, se lhe parece...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Romney Must Win Over Brazil to Deliver on Latin American Trade
By Brian Wingfield and Randall Woods
Bloomberg News, October 29, 2012
Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Mitt Romney’s plan for a Latin
American trade region to enhance U.S. export prospects faces an
enduring problem: Two decades after President Bill Clinton
proposed a similar idea, the region’s biggest economies remain
as mistrustful as ever.
Establishing accords with South America’s largest economies
-- Brazil and Argentina -- would be difficult after leaders of
the two nations joined with Venezuala’s Hugo Chavez in 2005 to
sink the U.S. proposal to create a region-wide trade zone,
according to regional experts.
“We have trade agreements with the governments that want
to have trade agreements with us already,” Michael Shifter,
president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue, said
in a phone interview from Managua, Nicaragua. “The ones we
don’t have trade agreements with are either not particularly
interested or they’re very small markets that wouldn’t make much
of a difference anyway.”
Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, has promoted
free trade as part of his job-creation plan. President Barack
Obama has stressed his administration’s enforcement of trade
rules, including cases involving China. While Obama, 51, last
year signed three trade deals that had been under consideration
since before his presidency, including ones with Colombia and
Panama, Romney, 65, has vowed greater focus on Latin America.
‘Huge Opportunity’
“The opportunities for us in Latin America we have just
not taken advantage of fully,” Romney said in the Oct. 22
presidential debate. “As a matter of fact, Latin America’s
economy is almost as big as the economy of China. We’re all
focused on China. Latin America is a huge opportunity.”
The combined gross domestic product for the Latin American
and Caribbean region in 2011 was about $5.8 trillion in current
U.S. dollars, according to the World Bank. China’s GDP was about
$7.3 trillion.
The Clinton administration in 1994 proposed the creation of
a 34-nation hemispheric trade zone known as the the Free Trade
Area of the Americas, or FTAA. The effort was abandoned in 2005
after Chavez led tens of thousands of protesters who burned an
effigy of President George W. Bush while he was attending a
regional summit in Argentina to discuss the proposed trade zone.
Chavez said the failed accord was an attempt by the U.S. to
“annex” Latin America.
Romney’s plan would seek to build upon free-trade deals the
U.S. already has in place, while creating a broader accord --the
Reagan Economic Zone -- open to any nation “willing to abide by
the rules,” according to a document posted on the Romney
campaign’s website.
Free Enterprise
“Governor Romney is committed to expanding America’s
trading relationships in the region by working to deliver on the
promise of signed agreements, by pursuing new agreements, and by
building a broader Reagan Economic Zone that strengthens ties
among nations committed to the principles of free enterprise,”
Amanda Henneberg, a campaign spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.
The reference to Ronald Reagan might face skepticism in the
region, where people often associate the former president with
U.S. support for the Contras in Nicaragua and the 1983 U.S.
invasion of Grenada, according to Shifter.
“Romney would have to establish trust, and probably
evoking Reagan doesn’t quite have the resonance in Latin America
that it has in the Tea Party,” he said, referring to the U.S.
political movement that has supported Republican candidates.
Connect Accords
As president, Romney would seek to “stitch up the
agreements we have” into a regional trade zone, former Commerce
Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, an adviser to the Republican
nominee’s campaign, said during an interview Aug. 21. Such an
effort would require nations in the region that have trade pacts
with the U.S. to reduce economic barriers among themselves, he
said.
The U.S. has in place free-trade agreements with 10 Latin
American and Caribbean nations: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the
Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico,
Nicaragua and Peru. An 11th accord, with Panama, is scheduled to
take effect Oct. 31. Trade preferences in place for Ecuador are
set to expire in 2013, and U.S. relations with the nation have
been strained over issues including Ecuador’s ties with Iran and
Chavez.
It would be difficult to increase the number of trade
accords in Latin America because of probable opposition from
nations whose leaders can be hostile to the U.S., Rubens
Barbosa, Brazil’s ambassador to the U.S. from 1999 to 2004, said
in a phone interview from Sao Paulo.
Mercosur Bloc
A deal with the so-called Mercosur trade bloc, which
includes Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela, would also be a
challenge because the Latin Americans would insist the U.S.
reduce barriers on agricultural imports, said Barbosa, who
participated in the failed FTAA talks.
The U.S. filed a complaint against Argentina in August at
the Geneva-based World Trade Organization over restrictions on
imports from the U.S. Ten days later, Argentina fired back,
telling the WTO that American import restrictions on Argentine
meat weren’t justified.
The biggest missing element in trade policy with Latin
America is an accord between the U.S. and Brazil. The nation’s
$2.5 trillion economy is bigger than the combined size of the 11
regional nations that have free-trade pacts with the U.S.
“It’s just a big honkin’ economy,” Scott Miller, a senior
adviser for trade policy at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington, said in a phone interview.
“There’s a big commercial relationship to be had.”
Competitive Edge
A deal with Brazil could expand exports of high-tech
products and services in which the U.S. has a competitive edge
over China, which is also establishing a presence in the region,
Miller said.
China is the biggest export market for Brazil and Chile,
the world’s top copper producer, and second-largest for Peru,
Costa Rica and Cuba, according to an April report published by
the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America and
the Caribbean, known as Eclac. China is on track to surpass the
European Union as Latin America’s second-biggest trading
partner, behind the U.S., it said.
“China is occupying space the U.S. has left vacant because
the U.S. decided to commercially neglect the region,” according
to Barbosa.
Brazilian Tension
U.S. economic relations with Brazil, its eighth-largest
trading partner last year, are at the moment tense. During the
last two months, the countries have sparred over Brazil’s
proposed tariff increases on industrial goods, U.S. monetary
policy and agricultural subsidies.
“I hardly think it’s possible to have a trade agreement
with Brazil because the thinking here is the U.S. cannot deliver
what we want: the opening of U.S. markets and reduction of
subsidies as well as other protectionist practices in the
agricultural area,” Barbosa said.
While a U.S. agreement with Brazil may not be in the
nations’ immediate future, trade policy experts say Romney could
still improve economic ties with the region.
“People complain that you can’t do a deal with Brazil so
you should give up on Latin America,” Eric Farnsworth, vice
president of the Council of the Americas, a New York-based
business organization, said said in a phone interview from his
Washington office. “That’s ridiculous.”
Integrating Accords
Integrating existing U.S. accords with Latin American
nations would provide uniformity to pacts that govern different
goods and standards, he said. The country could also seek to
expand a Pacific-region trade pact to include Colombia, Costa
Rica and Panama, according to Farnsworth.
The Latin America and Caribbean region is projected to grow
by 3.2 percent in 2012 and 3.9 percent in 2013, according to the
International Monetary Fund. The organization projects the
economy of Chile to expand by 5 percent this year and Peru’s to
grow at 6 percent.
“These are growth powerhouses and there’s no reason not to
tap into that,” said Miller, with the Center for Strategic and
International Studies. Linking existing trade accords would
integrate producers in the region, much as the North American
Free Trade Agreement has deepened the economic relationship
among Canada, Mexico and the U.S., he said.
The next U.S. administration will also need to deal with
growing trade tensions with Mexico, the nation’s third-largest
trading partner. The U.S. Commerce Department on Sept. 27 made a
preliminary decision to end a 16-year-old agreement that sets
prices of tomato imports. Mexican officials have said they are
willing to challenge the determination.
Mario Lopez Valdez, governor of the state of Sinaloa, a
large agricultural producer on Mexico’s western coast, said the
U.S. action is a violation of Nafta.
“If free-trade agreements are signed and then violated or
not respected, it makes no sense to be signing free-trade
agreements,” he said through a translator during an interview
in Washington.
For Related News and Information:
Top news about Latin America: TOP LAT <GO>
News about trade: NI TRD <GO>
News about the U.S. elections: ELECT <GO>
U.S. trade balance: USTB <GO>
--Editors: Jon Morgan, Daniel Enoch
To contact the reporters on this story:
Brian Wingfield in Washington at +1-202-654-7318 or
Randall Woods in Santiago at +56-2-487-4017 or
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Jon Morgan at +1-202-654-7370 or
Joshua Goodman at +55-21-2125-2535 or
