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REGION MUST KEEP WHAT IT ALREADY HAS IN CURRENT CAFTA ROUND.

Article Excerpt
Round six of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) negotiations started on July 27 in New Orleans. This is the round that could trigger the Matthew effect, so called for the passage in the gospel of Matthew: "For to him who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away."

What Central America has is the possibility of losing tariff-free access to the US market of most its goods (see NotiCen, 2000-10-12) under the provisions of the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) and the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP).

Vice Minister of Economy Eduardo Ayala Grimaldi said, "What interests us most is textiles and clothing manufacture, our most important categories of exports, which are protected by the CBI." Other important exports, he said, for which the region must fight to preserve duty-free status, include shoes, gaskets, cardboard, candy, ethyl alcohol, snack foods, iron, and steel.

Research done by the Consejo Empresarial Centroamericano (Ceca) indicates that the present negotiating stance of the US eliminates the free pass for almost everything now covered by the two unilateral US initiatives. In agriculture, according to Rigoberto Monge, Salvadoran private sector negotiator, 332 items will enter the US duty free within five years. But 327 of those items already enter free under CBI. The US...

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