Global Trade

Although a trade panel is expected this week to order the United States to permit access to all U.S. roads by Mexican trucks, the U.S. should continue to limit access because of the grave dangers many Mexican trucks pose to motorists on U.S. highways, Public Citizen has concluded in a report released today. Read More

Workers at a factory in American Samoa that made apparel for the J. C. Penney Company and other retailers were often beaten and were provided food so inadequate that some were ''walking skeletons,'' a Labor Department investigation has found. Read More

The police used water cannons and steel fences to stop protesters on Saturday from getting within a mile of the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos. Read More

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has called on business to work harder on environmental and social issues. Read More

Sneaker maker Converse Inc., best known for its basketball and ''Chuck Taylor'' brand shoes, is closing three North American production plants and shifting production to Asia as part of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. Read More

Here is a chronology of FTAA Negotiations. Read More

On April 20, the leaders from 34 countries of the Western Hemisphere will meet in Quebec City to negotiate the most far-reaching trade agreement in history -- the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Read More

The new century is starting in Porto Alegre. All kinds of people, each in their own ways, have been contesting and critiquing neo-liberal globalisation, and many of them will be gathering in this southern Brazilian city on 25-30 January for the first World Social Forum. This time they won't just be protesting -- as they were in Seattle, Washington, Prague and elsewhere -- against the world-wide injustices, inequalities and disasters created by the excesses of capitalism (see the article by Bernard Cassen). Read More

He may not be comfortable discussing unrest in East Timor, or pronouncing the name of the leaders of Turkmenistan, but President-elect George W. Bush considers the rest of the Western Hemisphere "our backyard" and will have several opportunities in his first year in office to make Latin America a trade and foreign policy priority. Read More

Some 700 representatives of the central trade unions of the members of South America's leading trade bloc, the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) - Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay - called on their governments to submit an eventual continent-wide free trade treaty to national plebiscites. Read More