PUCMM professor of economy Federico Cuello feels the DR would be better off to discontinue the FTA proceedings with the US. “The DR-CAFTA continues to be touted as the salvation to achieving free trade with the US before the culmination of the FTAA. As if the trade preferences are to expire before 2008,” he writes today in El Caribe.
Cuello explains that in order to obtain the DR-CAFTA the country let the US lead its foreign policy. The DR sent troops to Iraq. It voted to exclude the US from the jurisdiction of the International Penal Court. There was a movement to reform our local law on intellectual property by decree. Nevertheless, no one can show the first-impact study to justify the rush. We also prejudiced, gratis, our negotiating positions before the WTO and the FTAA, he continues, and those who defend the adhesion to the pact remained mute. “They preferred to inaugurate public works financed with sovereign bonds,” he writes. As a former Dominican ambassador to the World Trade Organization based in Geneva, he recalls how he sent a letter on 27 May 2002 that enumerated how the Dominican negotiating positions would be affected on issues such as agriculture and intellectual property. He received no response to this letter.
Cuello criticizes the fact that, in order to sign the DR-CAFTA, the country accepted a to dock its accord to the ongoing CAFTA negotiations and in which our representatives were only able to bargain pre-selected items. “They couldn’t change one comma to the text of the agreement,” he writes. “And they did nothing to dismantle the real barriers that impede us from exporting. They left our farming sector defenceless for the US$18 billion in internal aid, subsidized credits and the guarantees granted by the US.”