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The Benefits Of CAFTA One Year Later
by Winter Casey
President Bush and El Salvadoran President Elias Antonio Saca on Tuesday highlighted the benefits that the Central American Free Trade Agreement has brought to both nations.
Bush met with Saca at the White House to discuss issues of mutual importance to the two countries. Noting that CAFTA will celebrate its first anniversary Thursday, Saca said: "During this year, we have increased by 20 percent all our exports. And our economy has doubled in size. So there's no doubt that free trade has allowed this to become true."
Bush said that people in the United States benefit from the agreement as well. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said the pact immediately eliminated 80 percent of tariffs on U.S. goods exported into the Central American region and will phase out the rest over 10 years.
But little data is yet available on the effects of the pact.
Bush and Saca also addressed immigration reform, illegal drug deals, developments in biofuels, and security issues. The White House has called El Salvador a close friend of the United States and a strong partner in the U.S. war on terror.
Bush signed CAFTA into law in 2005. The United States has been implementing the agreement on a rolling basis as countries make sufficient progress to complete their commitments under the agreement. Thus far, the agreement has been approved by the legislatures in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. Approval is pending in Costa Rica.
"Costa Rica is an important market for our members, and we are hopeful that they will ratify their CAFTA agreement and develop regulations that comply with its commitments," said Michael Nunes, the Telecommunications Industry Association's director of international and government affairs.
Nunes said his association was a vocal supporter of the agreement. If all CAFTA countries ratify the deal, Central America will be the 10th-largest region for telecom equipment exports, he said.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said on its Web site that the agreement "will open services markets such as telecoms, insurance and express shipments; provide new legal protections for copyrights, patents and trademarks; and foster transparency in government procurement."
Ann Rollins, vice president for trade and technology at the Information Technology Industry Council, said her group thinks "all free trade agreements are good for us."
CAFTA, however, has received its fair share of criticism.
Todd Tucker, the research director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, noted that CAFTA critics are taking over national governments in several CAFTA countries such as Nicaragua or Costa Rica or coming close to doing so. He also said the 2006 U.S. election swept many CAFTA critics to power.
Those developments show that the expansion of the mid-1990s North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada to more countries "is politically unpopular," he said.
Tucker decried the "draconian CAFTA-plus measures that the Bush administration has imposed on the Central American countries" since the deal. Examples include increased patent protectionism in Guatemala or tax code rewrites in the Dominican Republic. Those efforts show that CAFTA is "bad public policy," Tucker said.
In other news, Bush will host the annual U.S.-European Union Summit in Washington on April 30. Bush plans to discuss with European leaders ways to reduce regulatory and trade barriers, among other issues.
Telephones As Tools Against Disease
Leading players in the mobile telephone industry and the U.S. government have announced a $10 million public-private partnership to address the problem of deadly disease in Africa.
The initiative, which was unveiled earlier this month at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, seeks to harness the power of mobile phones in the developing world to collect health data. The "Phones for Health" partnership initially will target 10 African countries with a focus on HIV/AIDS prevention.
Members of the group include the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the GSM Association's development fund, Accenture Development Partnerships, Motorola, MTN and Voxiva. Eventually, the initiative is expected to expand to more countries in Africa and Asia to address tuberculosis, malaria and other infectious diseases, according to the GSM Association.
The U.S. government initially will provide $2 million to support expansion of the initiative in Nigeria and Rwanda in 2007.
The goal of Phones for Health is to give health workers standard Motorola handsets equipped with a downloadable application so they can enter health data that is transferred into a central database. The data is then analyzed by the system and made available to health authorities.
"The explosive spread of mobile phone networks across the developing world has created a unique opportunity to significantly transform how countries can tackle global health challenges," Howard Zucker, assistant director-general of the World Health Organization, said in a statement.
The GSM Association said that in many African countries, paper forms are still the primary way of recording the spread of disease. More than 60 percent of the African population, however, currently lives in areas with mobile phone coverage.
"Health workers will also be able to use the system to order medicine, send alerts, download treatment guidelines, training materials and access other appropriate information," said Paul Meyer, the chairman of Voxiva, which designed the software. "Managers at the regional and national level can access information in real time via a Web-based database."
New U.K. Think Tank To Focus On 'Open Source'
A new U.K. think tank that will focus on the use of "open source" software in the government and private sector officially launched Monday.
The open-source community advocates software whose underlying code can be viewed, altered and shared. The National Open Center aims to help the United Kingdom benefit from open source and open standards by developing strategic policy and encouraging innovation.
So far, the center has an advisory group of 25 members, which represent small businesses, multinational organizations, the public sector, education and the open-source community.
The work of the center also aims to help "coordinate and further the use of open source and open standards at the European level. We need such national focal points that push for openness and interoperability to create pan-European synergies," said Barbara Held, project coordinator of the European Commission's interoperable delivery of European e-government services to public administrations, businesses and citizen programs.
In other European news, Viviane Reding, the European Union's information society and media commissioner, and European Regulators Group Chairman Roberto Viola issued a joint statement in support of reforming the region's regulation of electronic communications.
"Promoting effective competition in electronic communications markets, and enabling the realization of the potential of cross-border and pan-European services are and will continue to be joint tasks of the commission and national regulators," the statement said. "Both must fulfill their tasks independently, consistently, effectively and in a timely fashion."
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