Costa Rica and Panama have been under negotiations to enter into a bilateral trade agreement since 2002, but the negotiations have gained momentum in recent years. The latest round of talks were held April 10 2007 and they have attempted to negotiate tariffs for a remaining 14% of products still not covered by the draft agreement.

Source: La Nación.

Well sort of. April 2nd was the last day for the Office of the United States Trade Representative to conclude negotiations and sign any trade agreements that they would like to see presented to Congress under the Trade Promotion Authority. The act requires a 90 day time period for Congress to debate and then vote on a trade measure presented under the TPA. The TPA expires at the end of June, therefore they had to the 2nd of April.

The President doesn’t have to present these deals under the TPA, but that authority does set a ‘fast track’ procedure which can be an advantage to getting them approved. As was noted in a recent AP piece by a leading Democract and a leading Republican on the Panama US FTA:

“We will continue to pursue agreement on these issues in the coming days because re-establishing a bipartisan foundation on trade policy is more critical than meeting a procedural deadline,” the two men said in their statement. [Link]

The USTR spent the time leading up to the April 2nd deadline completing negotiations with South Korea. Ben Muse has an excellent collection of resources that he is constantly updating on the KORUS FTA, which is located here.

In another statement, House Dems stated that they would use the 90 days prior to the TPA’s expiration to:

… use the 90-day notification period for discussions with the administration over “incorporating necessary changes on outstanding issues such as labor, environment and intellectual property that must be addressed before the bills will receive broad bipartisan support in Congress.”

So IP will be on the table when the Democrats try to work out an agreement for further extensions of the authority. While this wouldn’t effect the DR CAFTA agreement, the US is in negotiations with several other Central and South American countries and therefore we could see a different approach to IP in future agreements in the region. IP, as mentioned elsewhere on this blog, is an important component when looking at the impact of FTAs on IT based businesses. Areas include secondary liability for ISPs in the area of copyright infringement, ISP liability rules patterned on the DMCA,  and anti-circumvention provisions that software and hardware makers must comply with (these are also patterned on the DMCA).

You may have noticed that this blog has been relatively quiet over the past week and half or so.  This is because we have been hard at work on the project report, which should be out by the end of this month. We had a meeting about the rough draft last week, and it looks like the report might be published in a leading academic journal, and we have plans to translate it into Spanish over the summer.  The Centre is getting a new Web Officer, who will take over many aspects of the websites that are a part of the Centre’s activities. As a result, the wiki should be out by the end of the month as well. I’ll be following up this post with some of the news that we’ve missed, as well as posting more regularly over the next few weeks.