The Bush administration has had to hit the international trade ground running as the spy-plane duel shook the foundation of last year's trade deal with China and threatened to set Sino-U.S. relations back years.

Now that the U.S. service men and women have safely returned and the United States has avoided (at least temporarily) a trade embargo that could easily make recession a reality, President Bush has turned his attention to convincing our trading partners that the United States remains committed to trade liberalization. An immediate opportunity to make his case is through the negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Negotiators met in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in early April, and hemispheric leaders assembled in Quebec City on April 20 to try to re-energize the FTAA. This "NAFTA-plus" trade deal proposes to eliminate all tariff and trade barriers between the 34 countries of North, Central, and South America. Exporters in many of those countries would have much to gain if the pact were approved, especially with respect to new opportunities in trade-restricted commodities, textiles and apparel, and production-sharing arrangements.

The likelihood that such a vast collection of disparate economies and cultures could consolidate into borderless unity in the near future has to be viewed with some skepticism by transportation and logistics professionals, not to mention the customs bureaucracies of those countries. Among the many hurdles to such an agreement are the existing preferential trading arrangements within the hemisphere, such as NAFTA and Mercosur, which could be diluted by an FTAA. Furthermore, anyone who handles the documentation, inventory tracing, and origin certification for automotive and electronics assemblies under NAFTA's arcane origin rules can imagine the headache that would result from extending that regime to 34 countries. The possibility of having to respond to 10 or 20 FTAA audits is enough to drive a logistics manager to early retirement.

It is more likely that the administration's focus on the FTAA is a prelude to its push to get general Trade Promotion Authority from Congress. Formerly known as "fast track" authority, this would assure trading partners that negotiated deals could not be picked apart by Congress after an agreement had been signed.

There are other reasons to think that a broader trade negotiating round—to be launched at a WTO ministerial meeting in Qatar in November—is the more likely objective. For one thing, many of the issues of greatest interest to U.S. agricultural commodity shippers can only be effectively addressed in a broader WTO negotiating round, which would include other regions in talks to eliminate subsidies. Both Brazil and Argentina, which would be major players in an FTAA, are loath to reduce tariffs in that context absent a commitment by the United States to eliminate subsidies and other agricultural protections. Such topics as investment policy, the environment, labor, competition law, and anti-dumping rules seem best addressed, from both a practical and a political standpoint, on a multilateral rather than a regional basis.

Although the Bush administration clearly hopes to fulfill its commitment to hemispheric free trade, it is just as likely that goodwill from the Quebec Summit will soon be concentrated on negotiating with Congress and ultimately, on Qatar and the unfinished business of the WTO meeting in Seattle.