NAFTA Architects Bemoan Unfinished Business


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Monday June 7 12:49 AM ET

NAFTA Architects Bemoan Unfinished Business

MONTREAL (Reuters) - Once pitted in tough negotiations, the architects of
North American free trade gathered to celebrate, and perhaps congratulate
themselves, on the launch 10 years ago of a program to sweep away regional
barriers and fuel a boom in continental commerce.

But many delegates -- including a former Canadian prime minister and a
former U.S. president -- expressed concern over the fading of a larger
dream to expand free trade throughout the hemisphere, ranging from Alaska
to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America.

Amid tight security, the weekend conference Free Trade at 10 years.
brought together many of the negotiators, officials and leaders who first
negotiated the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement in 1988, which went into
effect a year later, and the subsequent 1994 deal bringing in Mexico.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney -- who has taken both the
heat and the praise for pushing the original free trade agreement -- noted
the explosion in trade for all three countries created millions of jobs
and even insulated North American economies from the recent Asian economic
crisis.

"The free trade agreement has seen the greatest explosion of exports in
our history," Mulroney said at the McGill University-organized conference.

U.S.- Canadian trade with the United States has soared more than 80
percent in 10 years, with the two countries exchanging more than $1
billion in goods and services each day.

Meanwhile, statistics show, three-way trade between Canada, United States
and Mexico has also exploded, to more than half a trillion dollars a year
under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

"But there is a very, very heavy cloud on the horizon," Mulroney told the
delegates closing address Saturday evening to the two-day conference.

Mulroney and former U.S. President George Bush bemoaned the growing trend
of trade protectionism in the United States, which has been responsible
for delaying so called fast track approval in Congress to widen NAFTA to
include South American and other countries.

Mulroney said countries such as Chile and Argentina have been spurned by
the United States on joining the free trade zone and are instead
negotiating bilateral agreements without the involvement of the Americans.
"This trend away from American leadership is ominous and must be stopped,"
Mulroney said.

Bush told delegates in a luncheon address Saturday he was worried how his
country was turning "selfishly inward" with such "American First"
campaigns to keep out foreign goods.

"Even though they deny it, they advocate policies that amount to
protectionism and isolationism," Bush said.

Carla Hills, the U.S. Trade Representative from 1989-1993, said free trade
has helped all the countries, boosting Mexico, which has now replaced
Japan as America's largest second trading partner after Canada.

"It was not a good deal for all three countries, it was a great deal for
all three countries," Hills said during a panel discussion.

She said despite the success, the NAFTA deal is being used like a club by
protectionists, with opponents "chanting 'no more NAFTAs."'

Hills said leaders across the continents need to galvanize opinion back
toward free trade which she says has boosted jobs and growth rather than
threatened it.

Canada was bitterly divided over whether to enter a free trade agreement
with its much larger southern neighbor in the 1980s. Some still oppose the
deal on the grounds the country is losing manufacturing capacity and on
concerns the nation is losing its autonomy as governments move to
harmonize in a number of different areas. like environmental and labor
policies.

While the U.S.-Canada free trade pact was not a big headline maker in the
United States, the inclusion of Mexico in the later deal sparked much more
concern among some in the U.S. Congress and among labor groups.

U.S. presidential hopeful Ross Perot once predicted there would be a
"giant sucking sound" of jobs and plants going south should the United
States open its borders to relatively low-wage Mexico. And for many in the
U.S. the jury is still out on whether the country is losing some jobs to
free trade.

Former Mexican trade officials who negotiated the NAFTA deal noted that
the widening of U.S. and Canadian markets helped cushion their country's
economy from the impact of the nearly two-year-old Asian financial crisis.
Former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a driving proponent of
NAFTA, was not present at the gathering.
 
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