오바마, 나프타 재협상 공식화…한-미FTA 파장 촉각
첫 해외방문 캐나다서 ‘예상 깨고’ 제기
“노동·환경조항 본협정에 포함시킬 생각”
* 나프타 : 북미자유무역협정
출처 : 한겨레신문 기사등록 : 2009-02-20 오후 08:23:14 기사수정 : 2009-02-20 오후 08:24:19
http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/international/international_general/340099.html
버락 오바마 미국 대통령이 19일 첫 해외 방문지인 캐나다에서 북미자유무역협정(나프타)에 강화된 노동·환경 조항을 담는 재협상에 나설 방침을 공식적으로 밝혔다. 지난해 대선 과정에서 밝힌 또다른 공약사항인 한미 자유무역협정(FTA) 재협상을 요구할 가능성이 한층 높아졌다.
오바마 대통령은 이날 스티븐 하퍼 캐나다 총리와의 정상회담 뒤 기자회견에서 “정상회담에서 나프타 문제를 제기했다”며 “노동과 환경 조항을 다룬 부속합의서 내용이 효과적으로 시행되도록 협정에 포함시킬 생각”이라고 밝혀 재협상 의지를 분명히 했다. 1988년 서명된 나프타는 노동·환경 관련 조항을 본협정이 아닌 부속합의서에 규정하고 있다.
오바마 대통령은 자유무역을 지지하는 캐나다 정부를 의식해 “양국 보좌관들과 경제팀이 미국과 캐나다 사이의 중요한 무역관계에 혼란을 초래하지 않는 방법으로 이 일을 시작하길 희망한다”고 강조했다. 또 미국의 보호주의 강화에 대한 우려에 대해서도 “하퍼 총리에게 양국간 무역이 늘어나기를 원하며 줄어드는 것을 원치 않는다고 분명히 밝혔다”고 강조하기도 했다.
이에 대해 하퍼 총리는 “두 나라는 매우 복잡한 전체 나프타를 재협상하지 않고 일부 우려를 해소하는 방식으로 접근할 것”이라고 말해, 나프타 재협상을 둘러싼 양국간 분열 모습을 최소화하려는 모습을 보였다.
오바마 대통령도 미국 경기부양법안에서 공공건설 사업에 자국산 자재 우선구매를 규정한 ‘바이 아메리카’ 조항과 관련해 “세계무역기구와 나프타의 의무를 준수하도록 하겠다”고 다짐해, 최대 교역국인 캐나다의 우려를 해소하려는 자세를 보였다.
오바마 대통령이 대선 당시 자유무역협정 재협상 공약을 내놓았지만, 최근 경제위기로 세계 교역이 감소하고 있어 재협상 문제를 우선과제로 제기하기 어려울 것이라는 관측도 나왔다. 그러나 이날 발표로 그가 자유무역협정 재협상 공약을 정책과제로 분명히 설정하고 있음을 보여줬다.
그는 후보 시절 비준동의안이 의회에 제출되지도 않은 한미자유무역협정에 대해 “아주 결함있는 협정”이라며 재협상 뜻을 밝혔다. 그는 “자동차 관련조항이 불공정하게 한국 쪽에 유리하게 치우쳐 있고, 미국산 공산품과 농산물이 효과적, 구속력 있게 시장에 접근할 수 있다는 확신을 주기에 부족하다”고 재협상 분야를 지목하기도 했다.
오바마 행정부는 자유무역협정을 총괄하는 통상대표 대표와 상무장관 자리가 공석인 상황에서, 이 문제에 대해 “양국에 도움되는 방식으로 무역 확대”라고 에둘러 표현하는 등 한국 정부가 강력하게 반발하는 재협상을 아직 공식적으로 요구하지는 않고 있다.
워싱턴/류재훈 특파원 hoonie@hani.co.kr
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Obama wants to alter NAFTA without hurting trade
출처 : 로이터통신 Thu Feb 19, 4:23 pm ET
OTTAWA (Reuters) – President Barack Obama said on Thursday he wanted to begin talks to add enforceable labor and environmental provisions to the North American Free Trade Agreement without disrupting trade.
“My hope is as our advisors and staffs and economic teams work this through that there’s a way of doing this that is not disruptive to the extraordinarily important trade relationship that exists between the United States and Canada,” Obama said at a joint news conference in Ottawa with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Obama promised during last year’s presidential campaign to “fix” NAFTA by adding enforceable labor and environmental provisions to the core of the pact and by changing an investment measure that critics say gives business too much power to challenge government regulations.
That raised concerns in both Canada and Mexico about the future of the pact, which has been in force for 15 years.
Although NAFTA already has labor and environmental provisions, those are contained in separate “side” agreements rather in the core text of the pact.
“It strikes me, if those side agreements mean anything, then they might as well be incorporated into the main body of the agreements so that they can be effectively enforced,” Obama said.
“I think it is important, whether we’re talking about our relationships with Canada or our relationships with Mexico, that all countries concerned are thinking about how workers are being treated,” he said.
Obama also defended “Buy American” provisions of the new $787 billion U.S. stimulus package, saying they would be implemented in accord with both NAFTA and World Trade Organization rules.
He said it was important that countries resist “beggar-thy-neighbor” policies in the midst of the current world economic contraction to avoid making it worse.
“And as obviously one of the largest economies in the world, it’s important for us to make sure that we are showing leadership in the belief that trade ultimately is beneficial to all countries,” Obama said.
(Reporting by Doug Palmer; editing by Todd Eastham)
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Renegotiate NAFTA? Not anytime soon
Last Updated: Monday, February 9, 2009 | 4:49 PM ET CBC News
“No truck nor trade with the Yankees” was the slogan that swept the federal Conservatives to power in 1911.
It’s amazing how 100 years, a vanished empire, industrialization, two world wars and mass urbanization can refine thinking.
“If you really want to protect your workers and you really want to protect an industry, you open up the doors of opportunity,” International Trade Minister Stockwell Day told the Toronto Board of Trade in February 2009.
“You increase their chances to market their products. You don’t slam those doors.”
Since the adoption of the North American Free Trade Agreement on Jan. 1, 1994, Canada has become more reliant than ever on the open doors of its neighbour. U.S. trade with Canada totalled about $560 billion in the first 11 months of last year. China was in second place but well behind at about $379 billion.
So it’s no wonder the inclusion of a “Buy American” provision in U.S. President Barack Obama’s $787 billion US stimulus plan has Ottawa nervously waving the NAFTA agreement around.
3.4% annual growth
NAFTA phased out tariffs and eliminated barriers with the goal of expanding trade and investment among Canada, the United States and Mexico. The Canadian government says the economy has grown by an average of 3.4 per cent annually and generated 2.5 million jobs since NAFTA went into effect. Three main business groups in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico jointly declared NAFTA an “extraordinary success for all three countries.”
Labour has been a lot less enthusiastic. The Canadian Auto Workers complain of factory job losses to Mexico. The Canadian Labour Congress estimates that total employment in manufacturing in Canada is below pre-NAFTA levels while wages have stayed the same or declined.
The Economic Policy Institute in Washington published a report titled “NAFTA: Still Not Working for North America’s Workers” that claimed unemployment in Canada for the first 15 years of NAFTA was about the same as the 15 years before NAFTA. Only those in the top one per cent of the income scale saw significant growth in their earnings, the report said. The AFL-CIO, a federation of more than 50 American and international labour unions, said the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico and Canada has almost quadrupled since NAFTA went into effect, costing more than three-quarters of a million jobs.
Politically, even as late as February 2008, it was clear controversy over NAFTA still raged at the very top.
“I’ve said that I will renegotiate NAFTA, so obviously, we’d have to say to Canada and Mexico that that’s exactly what we’re going to do. We will opt out of NAFTA unless we renegotiate it,” said then presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. “I’m confident that as president, when I say we will opt out unless we renegotiate, that we will be able to renegotiate.”
During the presidential campaign, Obama had no dispute with his rival over NAFTA.
“Senator Clinton’s answer on this one is right,” he said. “I think we should use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage.”
Both candidates felt the agreement had cost thousands of American jobs. Clinton wanted tougher enforcement of labour and environmental standards and said she would remove the ability of foreign companies to sue the U.S. over its protection of workers. Whether all this was political posturing or whether it was heartfelt doesn’t matter much now. The subprime crisis and the credit crunch have cost about 3.6 million U.S. jobs since December 2007. More than 11.6 million Americans and about 1.3 million Canadians are unemployed.
It was bad mortgages, not NAFTA, that were responsible for most of this carnage. But does Washington now believe NAFTA must change to get Americans back to work?
Prime Minister Stephen Harper phoned Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderon, as the “Buy American” clause was being debated in the U.S. House of Representatives. The two leaders agreed that yielding to protectionism would be a mistake for their economies and that the best way to speed up economic recovery was by improving competitiveness. But Calderon says when he met with Obama in January, the subject of revising NAFTA never came up.
The U.S. economic stimulus package would have barred foreign-made goods and equipment from being used in public works projects financed with the $800 billion US of government money. While at first, it seemed NAFTA might be sacrificed in the protectionist spasm, the U.S. Senate agreed to water down the measure. The new language suggests the “Buy American” provisions must not contravene international trade agreements.
Obama confirmed the U.S. committment to NAFTA when he spoke with the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge on Feb. 17, 2008. Obama said Canadians should not be “too concerned” that a “Buy American” clause is still included in the recovery plan.
“My administration is committed to making sure that even as we take steps to strengthen the U.S. economy, that we are doing so in a way that actually over time will enhance the ability of trading partners, like Canada, to work within our boundaries,” he said.
Obama expects “a lot of governors and mayors” will demand the stimulus projects buy products and services from U.S. companies, instead of foreign competitors.
“But … we are going to abide by our World Trade Organization and NAFTA obligations just as we always have,” Obama said.
But the fact is, encouraging domestic purchasing for government programs has been a U.S. policy since the 1930s. The Canadian steel company ADF Group found out not much had changed when it challenged the federal Surface Transportation Assistance Act, which required federally funded state highway projects to use only domestically produced steel.
It sued under Chapter 11, a NAFTA provision that allows private companies to sue the federal governments of any of the three countries if a member country enacts laws that “expropriate” their profits. ADF sought $90 million US in damages.
But in 2003, a U.S. Tribunal rejected all of ADF Group’s claims in their entirety. As far as state projects were concerned, the trade wall was not about to be scaled by NAFTA.
Even Canada’s international trade minister recognizes the NAFTA limits.
“We’re not expecting that they would roll back provisions that have been in place as far back as 1933 … but we are saying, ‘Stop, it’s gone far enough,’ ” Day recently told the Vancouver Board of Trade.
While it’s sometimes hard to tease out the truth about whether NAFTA has been good or bad for Canada, a 2006 Statistics Canada study was unequivocal.
It concluded NAFTA provided Canada and all of its regions with better access to the large North American market and all regions benefited through improved productivity performance, higher wages and higher output growth — especially Ontario.
The study found that deepening trade integration with the United States increased productivity by 1.2 per cent per year for manufacturing in Ontario from 1988 to 1999. In other regions, not so much. Trade integration raised productivity in manufacturing by 0.4 per cent a year in Quebec, 0.3 per cent in Western Canada and 0.2 per cent in Atlantic Canada.
Down Mexico way
The 2006 study found there was not much truth to worries that trade integration might cause more Canadian firms to relocate to the larger U.S. market. It found trade with Mexico didn’t explode either. It called trade lacklustre despite the NAFTA deal and although Canadian exports to Mexico have quadrupled since 1993, Canada’s trade with China has far outperformed that with Mexico.
In fact, a number of studies suggest NAFTA hasn’t been the best fit for Mexico. The World Bank, a major supporter of free trade and globalization, reports that a wide gap between rich and poor remains intact in Mexico. Poverty, it said, had not been significantly reduced in the country even though NAFTA did speed up the transfer of U.S. technology to its southern neighbour. A report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said NAFTA failed to generate the promised Mexican jobs. Hundreds of thousands of subsistence farmers lost their livelihoods when they couldn’t adjust to the rapid reductions in tariffs. Many moved north, contributing to the U.S.’s illegal immigration problem.
Interestingly enough, the recession seems to have slowed this stream of immigrants since many don’t appear to think it’s worth the risk to venture into the recession-ridden north.
But mostly, when Canadians think of NAFTA, they think of the $1.5 billion-a-day trading relationship with the U.S.
When the prime minister and the U.S. president meet in Ottawa on Feb. 19, they’ll have lots to discuss: lost jobs, reduced investment, shortage of credit, bank bailouts, stimulus packages and infrastructure spending.
But reopening NAFTA? For now, there are bigger fish to fry.
With files from the Associated Press and the Canadian Press.
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Obama takes softer NAFTA stance at Canada summit
By Sam Youngman
출처 : [The Hill] Posted: 02/19/09 04:08 PM [ET]
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/obama-takes-softer-nafta-stance-at-canada-summit-2009-02-19.html
President Obama, in Canada on his first international trip as president, struck a more conciliatory note on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA ) than he did on the campaign trail.
Obama, who suggested during the campaign that the U.S. might unilaterally withdraw from the agreement if labor and environmental protections weren’t moved to the main body of the agreement, said he wants “to be very careful about any signals of protectionism.”
At a joint press conference with Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Ottawa, Obama said he “raised the issue” with Harper in a private meeting, and said while he still wants to see those protections in the main part of the agreement, he hopes “there’s a way of doing that that is not disruptive” to trade between the two countries.
“I provided Prime Minister Harper an assurance that I want to grow trade, not contract it,” Obama said.
Harper, who said that NAFTA and the World Trade Organization (WTO) “have been “nothing but beneficial to our two countries,” said that he is “perfectly willing to address [Obama's] concerns.”
However, Harper did not appear yielding on renegotiating NAFTA like Obama suggested during the campaign, saying that he wants to address Obama’s concerns “without reopening NAFTA and unraveling what is a very complex agreement.”
“We expect the United States to adhere to its international obligations,” Harper said, adding that he has confidence the U.S. will do so.
The two men also announced a collaborative “clean energy dialogue” that will include a working relationship among senior officials from both countries and joint research and development of clean energy technologies.
There was also a discussion of the countries’ respective economic stimulus packages, and how they fit into what they recognize as a global financial crisis.
“We know that the financial crisis is global, so our response must be global,” Obama said.
On the issue of Afghanistan , where Obama has just pledged to send 17,000 troops and Canada’s Parliament has set a withdrawal date of 2011, Obama said he “certainly did not press the prime minister” to extend the country’s military involvement in the country.
“The people of Canada have an enormous burden there which they have borne,” Obama said, adding that the U.S. is “grateful” for Canadian military involvement.
Harper said his country has signaled its intention of a “greater engagement on economic development,” and any military involvement on the part of any country should focus on training Afghans to defend their own country and should “have the idea of an end date.”
Both Harper and Obama said the meeting was “productive” and pledged greater cooperation between the neighboring countries.
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Inside U.S. Trade – February 20, 2009
Harper Willing To Consider Obama-Backed Labor, Environment NAFTA Fix
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterday (Feb. 19) expressed willingness to consider an overture from U.S. President Barack Obama to include labor and environment provisions in the text of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), provided it does not unravel the whole agreement.
February 19, 2009
Vilsack Ignites Stir Over COOL On Eve Of Obama Visit To Canada
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack this week caused a stir over mandatory country-of-origin labeling (COOL) on the eve of President Barack Obama’s visit to Canada, by calling on U.S. meat packers to adopt stricter labeling requirements for meat than envisioned in the 2008 farm bill.
Obama, Harper Discuss NAFTA, Buy America, ‘Thickening’ Of Border
February 18, 2009
Obama Backs Changes To NAFTA, Highlights Need To Preserve Trade
In advance of this week’s trip to Canada, President Barack Obama yesterday (Feb. 17) reiterated his interest in incorporating labor and environment commitments in the text of the North American Free Trade Agreement so that they are fully enforceable, but also emphasized that he does not want to jeopardize trade with Canada.