The Trouble with Trade.(Free Trade Area of the Americas talks)(Column)

At first blush, Jorge Lavandero would seem to have little in common with the young, rock-hurling demonstrators in gas masks and bandannas who converged on downtown Miami during last week's Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) talks. The 73-year-old Chilean senator belongs to the centrist Christian Democrat Party--a pillar of the center-left government that signed a historic bilateral free-trade agreement with the Bush administration late last year.

But Lavandero thinks his country got a raw deal under the trade treaty, which was recently ratified by his colleagues in the Senate, and he wants the Chilean courts to nullify the accord as unconstitutional. Among his gripes, Lavandero says that Chile will not be free to change environmental laws under the terms of the deal, or to raise royalties on foreign mining companies, without subjecting itself to challenge from U.S. corporations or investors for "changing the rules of the game." His critique of the deal echoes the slogans and rhetoric invoked by the anti-globalization crowd at last week's protests. "This is not free trade, this is a political imposition," says Lavandero. "We are practically giving up our sovereignty."

Those bitter words were a far cry from the effusive congratulations that trade negotiators exchanged on the final day of the FTAA meetings in Miami. Foreign and trade ministers representing 34 countries approved a vaguely worded communique that formally identified the nine core issues that negotiators will tackle over the next year. Many of the principals in Miami also took part in the disastrous World Trade Organization summit in Cancun in September. Against that backdrop, the mere fact that dozens of government delegations managed to agree on a declaration was hailed as a breakthrough in some quarters--even if the text was mostly an exercise in face-saving public relations. "In Cancun... everyone was dancing to the beat of their own drummer," said the beaming Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim. "Today we can be very happy that we have reached a [common] result."

For all the backpatting, though, the latest round of FTAA talks may have the unintended result of refocusing trade negotiations on more limited bilateral and regional deals in the foreseeable future. The FTAA is supposed to create the world's largest free-trade zone by January 2005. But the nine-year-old negotiations have been dogged by philosophical and practical differences between one very rich nation and 33 mostly poor ones. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick acknowledged the problems last week, calling Washington's quest for an FTAA deal a "tremendous challenge."

The stalemate between the United States and Brazil, the hemisphere's two largest economies, is the first of many hurdles. The United States has thus far rejected any commitment to slash its massive subsidies to American farmers--a key Brazilian demand. And Brazil is resisting U.S. efforts to reach binding agreements on investment, intellectual- property protection, government-procurement guidelines and other politically sensitive issues. As a way of prodding the reluctant Brazilians in the FTAA forum, Washington is moving aggressively on other negotiating fronts, and on the second day of the Miami parley Zoellick announced the opening of free-trade talks with Panama, the Dominican Republic and four Andean countries. "The attitude is, 'Hell, time's a-wastin'," ...