U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Association of American Chambers of Commerce in Latin America
U.S. Section of the Brazil-U.S. Business Council

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Association of American Chambers of Commerce in Latin America (AACCLA), and the U.S. Section of the Brazil-U.S. Business Council welcome this opportunity to present our views on the emerging Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).  We strongly support free trade in the hemisphere, and we have previously submitted recommendations to the Committee of Government Representatives on the Participation of Civil Society and to the previous seven meetings of the Americas Business Forum giving our perspective on how the agreement should be framed.

Agricultural trade is a major component of international trade and must be treated as all other goods in the FTAA.  Furthermore, there must be a strong commitment among all participants to remove tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade in all agricultural commodities and value-added finished food products. Additionally the FTAA should include clear rules on the application of sanitary and phytosanitary regulations, and the elimination of all subsidies on exports and domestic production.  Compliance in agricultural trade would be aided by regulatory transparency.  Measures should be adopted to ensure that regulations are published in English, Portuguese and Spanish and available on the Internet and by other means.

We would like to express our support of the consensus reached during the VI Americas Business Forum 2001 agricultural workshop that for a successful FTAA, we should declare the hemisphere a subsidy-free zone.  Furthermore, countries in the region should pledge to neither extend subsidies on their own exports, nor to admit subsidized imports from outside the region.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Association of American Chambers of Commerce in Latin America
U.S. Section of the Brazil-U.S. Business Council

Recommendations for the Agriculture Negotiating Group

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Association of American Chambers of Commerce in Latin America (AACCLA), and the U.S. Section of the Brazil-U.S. Business Council welcome this opportunity to present our views on the emerging Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).  We strongly support free trade in the hemisphere, and we have previously submitted recommendations to the Committee of Government Representatives on the Participation of Civil Society and to the previous seven meetings of the Americas Business Forum giving our perspective on how the agreement should be framed.

Specifically we recommend that the governments in the hemisphere agree during the Quito FTAA Ministerial to take the following actions to build a strong foundation for the final FTAA Agreement, including endorsing the following measures:

• The FTAA countries should eliminate agricultural export subsidies (as defined in the WTO Agreement on Agriculture) in the region and ban subsidized imports from outside of the region as soon as is feasible.
• Liberalization measures — whether market access, export competition, or domestic support — must be applied on a product specific basis rather than as an average across all commodities.  This approach is important both within the FTAA and especially in the WTO, where tariff and farm support reduction goals used an averaging mechanism that allowed some commodities to escape meaningful liberalization.
• Minimum entry price schemes and price band systems for imported commodities and related finished food products must be eliminated.  Such mechanisms undermine the integrity of the market access negotiations.
• FTAA countries cannot realize the full benefits of liberalization without a concerted effort to remove non-tariff barriers, especially product standards, mandatory labeling, and sanitary and phytosanitary requirements.  The guiding principle should be the limitation of technical standards and regulations to only those necessary to protect public health and safety.  Some examples of existing practices that obstruct trade and should be addressed in the negotiations are:

º  Pre-import registration procedures that demand proprietary product content and process information that
   goes far beyond what is necessary to establish safety.

º  Excessive inspection, sampling, and quarantine practices for foods that are not justified by risk
   management principles.

º  Requirements that industry re-test and re-certify products that have already been tested for conformity
   to similar standards in multiple markets.

• To help alleviate some of the conditions that create non-tariff barriers, the negotiations should include as objectives:

º  The harmonization among FTAA countries of product standards and labeling requirements for commodities
    and finished food products.
º  A transition to post-market inspection instead of pre-market registration for products imported into the
   FTAA community from other FTAA countries except in the case of products that are universally recognized
   to present some health risk.