US Congressmen ask Obama to take action on FTA
By Manuel Rueda, Editorial Director
Friday, June 4, 2010
Forty members of the US House of Representatives sent a letter to President Barack Obama this week, asking him to “take an important step towards expanding markets and creating American jobs by supporting approval of the US-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement.”
A free trade agreement between Colombia and the US has been waiting for the approval of the US Congress since November 2006, and the group of forty congressmen who wrote to Obama this week want the President to use his influence to pressure congress to take action on this issue.
The group includes 20 Democrats, and in its letter to Obama it says that many Colombian products currently pay no taxes to enter the US, while US products must pay tariffs in Colombia, arguing that “almost all economic studies conclude that the US will benefit” from a free trade deal with Colombia,
“The longer we wait to approve this agreement, the greater our losses will be,” says the letter, which claims that over the past three years US exporters have paid 2.7 billion dollars worth of taxes to Colombia, a sum that could have been saved if the agreement had been signed back in 2007.
Many Democrats in the US Congress, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, have been reluctant to sign a free trade deal with Colombia, claiming that the country must still improve its human rights record and in some cases arguing that an FTA with Colombia will lead to the loss of manufacturing jobs in the US.
Supporters of an FTA with Colombia however, argue that action must be taken soon to reach an agreement, because Colombia will begin to substitute purchases of US agricultural goods with goods from countries with which it is advancing free trade agreements such as Canada, the European Union and the MERCOSUR trading block in South America.
The congressmen who recently addressed Obama this week also argued that signing a free trade deal with Colombia is a matter of national security for the US as it consolidates alliances in a region where most countries are becoming “increasingly hostile” to their northern neighbor.
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