WASHINGTON — With last weekend’s collapse of World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations in Cancun, the Americans have conceded that their 2005 deadline for a hemispheric free trade pact is now likely to be unrealistic.

But the Bush administration has made it clear that it will push ahead with its trade agenda in the Americas with as many countries in the region willing to sign on to bilateral trade agreements with Washington.

“The problem is that we …. didn’t make the significant progress that we would have had to make in Cancun to come within reach of the 2005 deadline,” said Roger Noriega, the assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs. “That doesn’t mean that we can’t make progress in trade. I would expect that there will be a new push to look at willing partners. I think we should focus more on achievements rather than deadlines.”

Engaging “willing partners” means in practical terms, Noriega conceded, the United States moving ahead with trade deals with Latin American and Caribbean countries that are ready to have them.

“I think we are talking about bilateral agreements,” he said.

He added: “…There may be countries in the Caribbean that want to come this way. After what happened at Cancun, I would say that options for virtually every country in the Americas are wide open.

“Jamaica will have to consider its interest. Caricom may say ‘let’s do that agreement with the Canadians’. The Jamaicans may say ‘I can’t do that’. Or Trinidad and Tobago may say ‘let’s go with the United States and do a bilateral. So we are going to move forward.”

Caricom (Caribbean Community) countries are likely to take a long and close look at such an approach, regional diplomats suggest. These small, and poor economies, they say, do not only want to be certain that the issues they consider of importance are not lost in the current disarray, but to also ensure that they are not squeezed in an emerging hemispheric jostle for leverage between the United States and Brazil.

The Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, wants to bring South American countries into a single, strong trading bloc ahead of finalising any deal on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and the failure of Cancun is likely to give impetus to that ambition.

Long before the developing countries walked out of the Cancun talks, da Silva had been busy attempting to bring new members aboard the Mercosur trade group. And last week, President da Silva was in Argentina discussing the issue with his Colombian counterpart, Alvaro Uribe.

Indeed, the five-member Andean Community, which includes Colombia and Venezuela, has already signalled its intention to conclude a free trade agreement with Mercosur.

Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, has also separately promised to take his country into Mercosur by yearend.

This attempt, led by da Silva, to create this strong regional trade group, is at odds with the United States’ vision for a single free trade pact, running from Alaska to Argentina, with a market of 823 million people and US$3.4 trillion in trade. The combined gross domestic product of the FTAA would be US$14 trillion.

“…We think that the best thing to do is to bring the inter-American community together as a whole and not have sub-regional focuses,” assistant secretary Noriega told Latin American and Caribbean journalists last week in unusually candid remarks. “The project for the Americas is best served by broad-based co-operation and we hope that whatever policymakers of Brazil have in mind, that it is consistent with bringing us all together as a community and emphasising what we have in common and not our differences.”

While stressing that the United States and Brazil maintained strong relations, Noriega conceded that “it is going to be a sort of interesting relationship in the next six months or a year as we go forward with that project”.

The United States and Brazil co-chair the FTAA negotiations.

“We are not asking for anybody to agree with us on every aspect of our trade negotiations,” Noriega said. “That’s why you have negotiations. We are not going into these negotiations with preconditions. There are some global realities that limit what we are able to do. But we would like to build something and go forward with the FTAA.”

Critics say it is some of what America sees as its realities that helped to cause a breakdown at Cancun — specifically the billions of dollars in subsidy that the United States pumps into its farm sector annually.

These subsidies help to distort international trade and make it impossible for small and technologically ill-equipped farmers like Almando Powell of New Building in St Elizabeth, Jamaica to compete not only abroad, but in their home markets.

“Things getting harder for me still,” Powell, who has been farming for a decade, told the Sunday Observer a few weeks ago. In fact, he said, this is due, in part, to the influx of “cheap foreign” produce.

But it is not only the United States that maintains such subsidies — and not only for their agricultural sectors. The European Union (EU) and Japan, developing countries say, are also culprits.

At Cancun, developing countries, led by Brazil and other powerful emerging nations such as China and India, led the walk-out when rich countries, in their view, offered little on agricultural subsidies, yet produced draft proposals that would insist on a further opening of developing nations’ markets to imports of goods and services.

Richard Bernal, the Jamaican who heads Caricom’s Regional Negotiating Machinery (RNM), a body that helps the regional grouping prepare for international trade negotiations, lamented the collapse of Cancun but said: “No deal is better than a bad deal.”

Jamaica’s foreign minister, K D Knight, agreed and said Jamaica could never “sign on to an agreement which would decimate our vulnerable productive sectors and exacerbate social tensions”.

However, the Americans have three culprits for the debacle in the Mexican tourist resort town: the Europeans, the Japanese and developing countries themselves.

For instance, Noriega argued that the United States is in favour of reducing its farm subsidies — however, a Farm Bill passed last year will increase hand-outs to farmers by US$40 billion over a decade — but was not getting the support of the EU and Japan. And even the nature of the subsidies, he postured, were different.

The Americans, according to Noriega, offered subsidies to producers rather than “subsidies and tariffs” which block imports, as was the case with the EU and Japan. It was difficult to disaggregate the full impact of their subsidies, which, in any event, was higher than America’s, he argued

“It is hard to lower your subsides when the Europeans are not prepared to do so,” Noriega said.

Nonetheless, the Americans say that progress could have been made in Cancun, with the US trade representative, Robert Zoellick, insisting that developing countries “missed an opportunity to cut our subsidies”.

It was a case of “won’t do”, Zoellick said.

Noriega, speaking in Washington, was even more blunt.

“One thing you saw in Cancun,” he said, “was a bit too much political posturing and too little negotiating.”

“We are surprised at the level of guerrilla theatre that seemed to be part of this exercise,” Noriega said. “The problem was that when countries that had… made this confrontational environment decided to (say) ‘let’s get down to negotiating now’, it was too late…. We were not able to recover in time.”

Ironically, Noriega said that the United States understood the arguments being made by developing countries. “We have a great sympathy for them.”

However, some people, he said, had not shown the leadership to “get down to brass tacks and make some small but steady progress”.

“You always run the risk in a multilateral setting of having the lowest common denominator dragging you down or preventing you from making progress,” he said.

Another perspective in the United States, and shared by many third world delegates at Cancun, was that the Bush administration could not risk upsetting the farm lobby heading into an election year. Farm states voted in favour of the president in the 2000 election and the agri-business sector is a big financial contributor to Bush’s Republican Party.

An editorial in the Houston Chronicle in Texas on Thursday underlined what that newspaper saw as a contradictory “and often self-destructive” behaviour of the United States — as well as Europe and Japan — in giving subsidies to their producers while demanding that developing states open their markets.

“If the United States, Europe and Japan will not tolerate agricultural competition, poorer nations with weak or prostrate economies cannot be expected to open their markets,” the Chronicle said. “The Bush administration has filed complaints about China’s exploitation of cheap labour and barriers against US imports, but its contradictory policies weaken its moral suasion.”

Such observations, however, are unlikely to affect — at least not in the short-term — Washington’s perspective on the WTO’s negotiations or its newly-defined approach for building a free-trade arrangement for this hemisphere.

“The inter-American community will reach a Free Trade Area of the Americas,” said Noriega. “…It is going to be later than sooner, but it will happen.”

In fact, Noriega said, the United States has several suitors for the bilateral pacts which Washington is now projecting will eventually form the FTAA quilt.

For instance, the Americans expect to conclude a bilateral deal with the Central American Free Trade Area by yearend and are also talking with the Dominican Republic on a similar pact. Serious talks are also underway with Panama, Peru and Colombia

“I wish I had a US dollar for every foreign official who asks us for a bilateral agreement,” Noriega said. “…We don’t have to cajole and we certainly don’t have to impose. …If the multilateral sphere is not making progress, then we will have to consider bilateral alternatives.”

The United States, suggested Noriega, would like to see the Caribbean climb onboard, evidenced by its financial support to help build up trade negotiating and other expertise in the region.

The United States, he said, was also sympathetic, and will engage the region on its proposal for special and differential treatment of small island economies in a trade pact.

“I would like to think that we can find a way forward that will make it so that the Caribbean countries can stay a part of the process,” Noriega said. “I think that it is important that their economies are able to keep up and generate jobs and be competitive. We think a trade agreement is good, but you are not going to see us imposing agreements on people. If they are not interested in participating, in dealing with us, in negotiating, we are going to find some people who are willing to do so.”

Such straight talking by Noriega, a former US ambassador to the OAS who has been in his current job for less than two months, makes some Caribbean diplomats nervous, trying to size up America’s future approach towards the region. Indeed, there has been unease in some quarters about the forthrightness with which Bernal spoke in the American press after the Cancun debacle.

“Given all that has gone recently, including the tensions over the war in Iraq, I would have preferred to see us leaving all balls outside the off stump,” quipped one regional official.

But the affable Noriega said that apart from the trade issues, he is ready to work towards a broader development of relations between the United States and the Caribbean — America’s third border.

Among his first tasks as assistant secretary, he said, was to send a comprehensive brief to Jamaica’s ambassador in Washington, Seymour Mullings — the current co-ordinator of Caricom’s diplomatic group — outlining America’s thinking on issues of concern to the United States, but asking that they put their own concerns on the agenda.

Matters raised by the Americans include fighting drugs and terrorism.

Said Noriega: “I quite explicitly said, let’s talk about what’s on their agenda, because it is a common agenda.

“And I have to tell you that I am determined that we move forward with the Caribbean because as you know, some of your neighbours are particularly vulnerable to… destabilisation on the security front. Unemployment is another form of destabilisation. I am very sensitive to that.”

Noriega has, in recent weeks, met with the Barbadian Prime Minister Owen Arthur, Dominica’s Pierre Charles and St Vincent’s Ralph Gonsalves. He expects to meet face to face with others during this month’s General Assembly of the United Nations where St Lucia’s ambassador, Julian Hunte, will preside.