As the momentum builds towards what many in our part of the world hope will be an Obama victory in next Tuesday’s US presidential election, it is all too easy to forget that it is unclear exactly how the Caribbean and Latin America will stand to gain under the new incumbent in the White House. As we have pointed out before, neither candidate has given any sign that Latin America, much less the Caribbean, will be a foreign policy priority.
But amidst all the election hype, the lame-duck George W Bush has, in a move largely ignored by the media, announced a new initiative for the USA’s eleven Western Hemisphere free trade agreement (FTA) partners – Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama and Peru.
Towards the end of September, in the margins of the UN General Assembly, President Bush held a meeting in New York with the leaders of these countries with a view to creating a new free trade alliance.
The ‘Pathways to Prosperity in the Americas’ initiative, as it has been dubbed, envisages the consolidation of existing bilateral FTAs into a hemispheric − or semi-hemispheric − pact that would boost trade and, hopefully, increase economic opportunities and growth among all twelve nations. In a significant policy shift, senior US officials are using words such as “fair trade,” as they refer to the need for economic and social justice in spreading the benefits of trade liberalization.
According to a joint statement issued after the meeting, the partners in the initiative aim to “promote, integrate and advance all aspects of our hemispheric economic and development agenda” in order to derive greater mutual benefit from trade liberalization and open markets.
The twelve leaders also affirmed their commitment to a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific and to continuing to pursue other efforts to promote economic integration and free trade, including through the Summit of the Americas process, the Latin America-Pacific Arc Initiative, the Central American Economic Integration process, and the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership.
They also left the door open for participation by other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, which “share our commitment to democracy, open markets and free trade.”
The US has said that it will host a ministerial meeting before the end of 2008 to flesh out the details of the agreement. A second meeting of heads is projected for some time in 2009, though that is of course dependent on the agenda of the next American President.
The ‘Pathways to Prosperity’ initiative is meant in effect to replace the now moribund Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which foundered in 2005 at the 4th Summit of the Americas, in the face of resistance from countries like Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela.
While the FTAA had originally been spawned by the Summit of the Americas process, it appears that the new partnership is intended to offer an alternative to those countries of the hemisphere that favour free trade, especially in the face of Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Alternative to the Americas (ALBA) embraced by the Latin American left, as well as Dominica and St Vincent in the Caribbean.
Unsurprisingly, two influential friends of the White House, Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank and a former US Trade Representative under Mr Bush, and Luis Alberto Moreno, President of the Inter-American Development Bank and a former Colombian Ambassador to the White House during much of Mr Bush’s term, have praised the initiative as a timely effort to continue to use trade as a tool for growth.
However, Marcela Sánchez, a Washington Post expert on Latin America, among others, is sceptical of its chances of success.
Ms Sánchez welcomes the initiative as a belated acknowledgement by the Bush administration of the need to build prosperity in the region through a more moderate policy of engagement and partnership. She also concedes: “It is as if the United States is recognizing what so many countries in the region have been insisting on for some time: free trade alone doesn’t cut it. If unaccompanied by social development priorities, trade benefits the few and worsens deep inequalities.”
Unfortunately, neither Ms Sánchez nor we can quite see how this eleventh hour push will translate into a lasting legacy, as it is weak on detail and lacks any concrete mechanisms apart from the ministerial meeting to move things forward.
Maybe, just maybe, the 44th President of the USA will go to the 5th Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain next April with a new strategy for re-engagement with Latin America and the Caribbean, incorporating the good intentions of the ‘Pathways’ initiative. After all, Bill Clinton borrowed from the first George Bush’s Enterprise for the Americas Initiative, when he launched the Summit of the Americas process and the FTAA in 1994.
That said, we cannot help but feel that this is a case of too little too late, following on from the failure of George W Bush to make good on his early promises regarding close ties with Latin America – all before 9/11 of course. It really is difficult to regard this initiative as little more than a public relations exercise to try to salvage some goodwill in the dying days of a disastrous presidency.
