In their recent paper ‘A Contentious U.S. – Andean Free Trade Agreement Do it Right or Not at All’ Helen Cardena and Katherine Vyborny identify the key concerns for the continuing Free Trade Agreement negotiations between the US and the Andean countries Colombia, Ecuador and Peru in Washington, as agriculture, intellectual property, labor standards and environmental requirements. 

The paper warns that “if the negotiations are treated as a zero-sum competition, in which each side attempts to maximize the concessions received from the other while ignoring their larger implications, the agreement has the potential to undermine [it’s] goals: it may worsen already severe unemployment and inequality in the Andes, fuel the drug trade, and aggravate political and civil conflict”.

Thus, the paper recommends the following:
•    That sufficient time is allowed for negotiations, which would allow the Andean trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPA) to be renewed in addition to allowing the opportunity for popular bipartisan engagement through the forthcoming elections in all three countries in 2006.
•    The engagement of civil society, “particularly the Andean groups most vulnerable to the dislocations of trade liberalization, in order to build consensus and ensure the trade agreement does not undermine the goal of political stability and strengthening of democracy".
•    The building of consensus through strong labor and environment provisions.
•    Management of the transitions which would accompany the AFTA in each country in order to ensure stability and equity.  This would entail specialist treatment and concessions in sectors which generate high levels of employment (such as agriculture), “by lengthening phase-outs, and by sufficiently funding targeted capacity building to ensure the Andean countries can utilize their access to U.S. markets, and can develop alternatives to uncompetitive sectors.”

The paper calls for “a slower, more thorough negotiation process [which] will allow all four governments to engage civil society and build greater consensus. The negotiators must fashion an agreement that will have broad benefits across society…by allowing sufficiently long transition periods and, where necessary, special treatment for goods that provide livelihoods to large sectors of the population, and by including strong protections for labor and environmental standards.”