U.S. "FREE TRADE" with COLOMBIA

It's official. The U.S. now has a "free trade" pact (deal) with the South American country of COLOMBIA.

The "free trade" agreement with COLOMBIA became active on May 14th, 2012 when, just before midnight a cargo planeload of freshly cut multi-colored carnations, roses and lilies took off from Bogota, Colombia and landed in Miami, Florida. This was the beginning of the U.S./Colombia "free trade" agreement.

In fact the flowers would have avoided tariffs anyway, thanks to decade-long trade preferences under the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act. This already covered nearly 80% of Colombian exports, in exchange for efforts to reduce the supply of drugs. The new pact makes those benefits permanent, and extends them to almost everything else. Meanwhile American farm products such as soyabeans, top-quality beef, bacon, cotton and most fruit and vegetables can now enter Colombia duty-free, as can machinery, some vehicles, and textiles. The deal should also encourage investment in Colombia, both by American companies and by firms using the country as a base from which to export to the United States.

It has been a long time coming. The pact was signed in 2006 under George Bush and Álvaro Uribe. A change of administration in Washington held it up, as campaigners in both countries pressed their governments to make the deal conditional on better treatment of Colombia’s trade unionists.