Free Trade and
Colombia: 'Forging Our Own Path' (El Espectador,
Colombia)
“Colombia
lacks the huge geographical advantages Mexico has for entering the
U.S. market, and given its wide-ranging industrial and agricultural base, it is
more vulnerable than Chile to ‘collateral damage’ resulting from free trade deals.
This is why our nation must forge its own path.”
On May 15, the day the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. enters into force, the first
container likely to arrive at the docks will entail the importation of corn. It
seems incredible, but for several years, half of our
traditional “arepas” (corn patties) have been made
with imported maize.
Moreover, the magnitude of the challenge for Colombia, in order to avoid
excessive reprimarization of its exports, is more
than considerable [by “reprimarization,” the author
refers to a failure to make value-added products from the nation’s raw
materials. In other words – not benefiting in a sector in which the country has
a competitive advantage]. This is even more pressing, considering that for the
past 10 years, our country has sent an average of 42 percent of its exports to
the United States, with products from the mining and energy sectors
representing 70 percent of the total. It is therefore imperative for us to
learn from the experiences of countries in the region that have adopted trade
liberalization as a basis of economic policy.
Posted by Worldmeets.US
Chile, which for the past 20
years has been very proactive about making trade agreements, has relegated the
United States to third place in terms of a destination for its exports, with China
catapulting into the first slot as its largest trading partner. Nevertheless,
after all of its efforts, the country shows an export basket highly-concentrated
in the mining sector, the products of which in 2011 amounted to a little over
66 percent of its total shipments abroad.
Mexico is the obverse. Today
it is the regional leader in value-added exports in sectors like electrical
machinery, vehicles and mechanical appliances, thanks largely to its Free Trade
Agreement with the United States [NAFTA].
However, even though in the last decade it has pursued agreements with the
European Union, Japan and the EFTA, [European
Fair Trade Association] over 80 percent of its products remain concentrated
in its northern neighbor.
Colombia lacks the
huge geographical advantages Mexico has for entering the U.S. market, and given
its wide-ranging industrial and agricultural base, it is more vulnerable than
Chile to "collateral damage" resulting from free trade deals. This is
why our nation must forge its own path, so that the free trade agreement with
the United States becomes an opportunity to diversify products and markets. In
this direction, there is ample room to democratize opportunities for
integrating Colombian small- and medium-sized enterprises into new scenarios of
preferential access and advance a domestic agenda of free trade deals with
other regions, combining modern sector-based policies with an adequate
provision of public goods.
*Saúl
Pineda Hoyos is Director of the Competitive
Strategies Thinking Center at the University of Rosario
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