According to stories in the Diario Libre and the List?n Diario, the Dominican Republic will walk its own road towards a Free Trade Agreement with the United States. Industry and Commerce Minister Sonia Guzm?n de Hern?ndez told reporters yesterday that her talks in Washington last week (3-6 June) were ?very productive? and that the team had high hopes for a bilateral agreement in the short term. According to the Diario Libre, the deal could be signed as early as December.
The List?n Diario puts another slant on this development, however. In the lead article in the economic section of the paper, reporter C?ndida Acosta says that the DR withdrew from the talks regarding the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which would have provided a ?docking? clause for the DR in order to pursue a bilateral agreement with the United States. Minister Guzm?n, Deputy Minister Hugo Rivera Fern?ndez and the director of the Dominican Telecommunications Institute (INDOTEL), Orlando Jorge Mera, attended the third meeting of the Joint Trade and Investment Council, and presented the Dominican position that the country deserved a bilateral, free-trade agreement with the US.
The commission also requested that US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick take this request to his congress, as US legislators had told the commission that ?Central America does not want us [in the CAFTA accords].?
The commission presented part of a recently signed free-trade agreement with Chile as a starting point. Regina Vargo, the Assistant US Trade Representatives for the Americas, attended the meeting. The position of the Dominican commission for rejecting the ?docking? proposal is that the clause is unclear and because the DR would be obliged to negotiate from a Central American point of view.
When the members of congress met with the commission, they told them that the Central American countries were not happy with the Dominican inclusion into CAFTA, as they feared the fact that industrial free zones and industrial production of the DR are far more advanced.