Trade Issues in 'Good Shape' Barshefsky: Next President Faces Major Challenges
USA Today
November 3, 2000
By James Cox
WASHINGTON -- The next U.S. president should push for sweeping free-trade pacts with Latin America and Europe but recognize they won't get through Congress unless they protect worker rights and natural resources, the top U.S. trade official says.
U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky says the Clinton administration has positioned the United States to speed creation of a free-trade zone stretching from Canada to South America and jump-start global trade talks on services and farm products.
"We will hand that off in very good shape," she told USA TODAY in an interview.
Barshefsky, a trade lawyer in private practice before joining the administration in 1993, became chief trade negotiator in 1996. She outlined several challenges facing her successor, including:
A Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Barshefsky says the hemisphere's 34 democracies are taking too long to create a giant free-trade zone that would end tariffs, quotas and other barriers.
The FTAA idea, kicked off in 1994, isn't to be brought to life until 2005. "You could easily move that up to 2003," Barshefsky says. "It should be an absolute priority."
Brazil, South America's biggest trading nation, has forced neighbors to take a go-slow approach. The U.S., trying to accelerate the talks, will unveil a rough outline for the agreement by spring.
New global trade talks. The U.S. and Europe have narrowed differences that led to the collapse of last year's Seattle trade summit.
The gathering fell apart after European countries balked at U.S.-led efforts to dismantle their farm subsidies. The U.S. wanted to limit a new trade round to agriculture, services and e-commerce. It objected to European demands that talks should set rules for antitrust and bio-engineered foods and scrutinize U.S. anti-dumping laws.
Barshefsky says Europe and the U.S. have made "substantial progress" recently but gave no details.
Labor and environment. Poor countries won't agree to U.S. standards but would consider trade agreements requiring them to be faithful to their own worker-protection and environmental laws, she says.
Developing nations vehemently oppose suggestions by Vice President Gore that countries should face trade sanctions if they allow employers to abuse workers and pollute. They fear those measures, backed by U.S. unions, would lock them into Western standards and erase their advantage as low-cost suppliers of manufactured goods and commodities.
Holding poor countries accountable for abiding by their own laws "is a rational, sensible approach. ... I think South Africa, Brazil, some others could welcome it," Barshefsky says. "There will not be any more free-trade agreements passing the House of Representatives without these issues being attended to. It's a political given."
Bringing Russia into the World Trade Organization. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin "seems somewhat more interested" than Boris Yeltsin in joining the rules-based trading club, she says.
"It will be important to test that," she says. "There is no clear political direction on the manner in which economic reform is conducted. The result is that Russia's negotiating history on the WTO is to give a little, take it back."
Other trade pacts. Getting a Pacific Five pact between the USA, Chile, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand -- countries with generally low import duties and trade barriers -- should be "relatively easy."
The notion of a free-trade area encompassing the USA and the 15-nation European Union was derailed by France in 1997.
"The next administration should look at it again," Barshefsky says.
