American Free Trade Area
The (All) American Free Trade Area ( English Free Trade Area of the Americas , FTAA ; Spanish Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas , ALCA ; Portuguese Área de Livre Comércio das Américas , ALCA ; French Zone de libre-échange des Amériques , ZLEA ) is to create a free trade zone and a "common market from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego".
The free trade zone is to include all 34 states in North, South and Central America and the Caribbean (with the exception of Cuba for the time being). This area comprises nearly 800 million consumers with goods and services generated annually with a value of over ten trillion US dollars .
The planning for the free trade area began in the early 1990s, but for ideological reasons there is no chance of it being realized.
history
The plan for the FTAA was presented in 1991 by then US President George HW Bush . But it had already been preceded by several attempts to establish a common market across the double continent - for the first time in 1967.
As a first step towards the FTAA, a conference of the heads of state and government of 34 North and South American countries ( First America Summit ) took place in December 1994 . Cuba was the only American country not involved . 2005 was envisaged as the start date of the free trade area. However, the negotiations are turning out to be very difficult due to the great conflict of interests. The United States, for example, insisted on swift talks on tariff cuts, while many Latin American countries did not want to discuss the matter until later.
The negotiations did not take shape until 1999, when an agreement was reached on the formation of working groups. The third American summit took place in the Canadian city of Québec from April 20-22, 2001 , at which the heads of state and government reaffirmed the FTAA plan and on April 7, 2001 the trade ministers of the FTAA countries in Buenos Aires confirmed the work plan. It stipulated that the negotiations should be concluded by the end of 2005. In the meantime, a third draft of the FTAA contract is available, but the deliberations on this in November 2003 in Miami ended one day earlier due to major differences. They were accompanied by violent protests from globalization critics. Nevertheless, the heads of government reaffirmed the FTAA plan at the extraordinary America summit in Monterrey (Mexico) in January 2004 and at the end of the negotiations at the end of 2005.
In 2005, the USA was able to book partial success with DR-CAFTA , a free trade agreement that includes several Central American countries and the USA, although the agreement itself is not undisputed in its own country and in the partner countries.
Opposition and criticism
One of the main critics of the FTAA was the Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez , who described the free trade area as a “tool of imperialism” to spread into Latin America. As a counter-proposal to this initiative, Chavez founded the Bolivarian Alliance for America in 2005 . The focus is on agreements on the energy and infrastructure market, which should be gradually expanded and ultimately lead to full economic, political and military integration of the member states.
Evo Morales considers the planned FTAA to be US-dominated and an "agreement to legalize the colonization of America".
On the other hand, the presidents of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva , and Argentina, Néstor Kirchner , did not speak out against the FTAA, but requested some changes to the treaty. Above all, the openly or covertly subsidized agricultural goods from the USA are to be deleted and the assurance of effective access to foreign markets inserted.
One of the most controversial points put in the US treaty concerns patents and intellectual property . Critics claim the measures proposed by the US would stifle scientific research in Latin America. This would create further inequality through technological dependence on developed countries. Regarding the patents, my critics, such as B. Maude Barlow that the USA wanted to patent Latin American inventions itself.
See also
literature
- Carsten Meier: ALCA. Status and perspectives of Pan-American integration with special consideration of the sub-regions and conformity with the world trading system . Herbert Utz Verlag, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-8316-0645-5 .
- Hartmut Sangmeister : The ALCA process: James Monroe versus Simón Bolívar (= Ibero analyzes. Documents, reports and analyzes from the Ibero-American Institute , volume 14). Berlin 2003.
- Georg Schulze Zumkley: The project of a Pan-American free trade zone ALCA / FTAA . In: Constitution and law overseas (VRÜ) . 35th vol., 2002, pp. 108-119.
Web links
Individual evidence