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Official: U.S., Ecuador could resume trade talks this year(EFE Ingles Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Quito, Aug 5 (EFE).- Negotiations on a free-trade agreement between Ecuador and the United States that were suspended earlier this year after the former passed a controversial reform of its hydrocarbons law could be resumed between November and January, a U.S. diplomat here said. "We need to return to the (negotiating) table in November, December or January at the latest," said deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Ecuador, Jefferson Brown, during a visit to a large military base in the coastal city of Manta that hosts a contingent of U.S. military personnel engaged in drug-interdiction operations. Brown, in statements published Saturday by Quito's El Comercio daily, said he was optimistic about the resumption of talks with Ecuador and noted that President Bush's trade promotion authority - under which international trade agreements are subject to an up-and-down vote, but not amendment, in Congress - expires on July 1, 2007. The diplomat said the talks with Ecuador that were suspended in April were nearing a successful conclusion. Dialogue was suspended after the Ecuadorian government passed a law that forced multinational oil companies operating in the country to hand over no less than half of their windfall profits whenever the price of oil exceeded that established in existing contracts. Additionally, on May 16, Quito rescinded California-based Occidental Petroleum's oil-drilling concession in the Ecuadorian Amazon and gave state-run petroleum company Petroecuador control of its operations. Ecuador canceled Oxy's contract because the firm transferred assets without informing the relevant authorities in Quito. Occidental sold 40 percent of its concession to the Canadian company EnCana, which in turn later peddled that stake to a Chinese oil consortium. Since that time, the United States has not responded to several requests by Ecuador to set a date to resume the free-trade talks. "I think that (hydrocarbons) law was a negative blow to the talks. On top of that came the Oxy case, which gave Ecuador a bad image in Washington," Brown said. His statements are the first to offer a possible timeframe for an eventual resumption of the negotiations. For his part, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Francisco Carrion told El Comercio that he was satisfied with Brown's statements that, he said, "coincide with Ecuador's will to continue with the negotiations." Ecuador began negotiating a trade deal with the United States at the same time as its Andean neighbors Colombia and Peru, but Bogota and Lima have already signed pacts with Washington. EFE fa/mc |