Central American Free Trade Agreement-Dominican Republic, Environmental Cooperation Agreement, and the Organization for Central American Economic Integration Understanding Signings

First, I hope, John, that you will express my appreciation for the efforts of Paula Dobriansky and your entire team at State in concluding such an excellent environmental cooperation agreement. I also welcome the presence of Assistant Secretary Noriega at this ceremony today. The State Department has been a great partner of USTR in ensuring that environmental capacity-building proceeds hand-in-hand with implementation of our free trade agreements. And this environmental cooperation agreement is truly ground-breaking in a number of important respects.

It builds on previous FTA environmental cooperation mechanisms by providing for the establishment of short-, medium- and long-term benchmarks for results in capacity-building projects in priority areas, such as habitat conservation and treatment of hazardous wastes. This environmental cooperation agreement also provides for independent monitoring of success at meeting these benchmarks.

But we have signed two agreements here this morning, and I take particular pride in the Understanding that designates SIECA--the Organization for Central American Economic Integration--as the Secretariat for implementation of the CAFTA-DR’s public submission mechanism.

The CAFTA-DR is the first free trade agreement ever to include this kind of mechanism in its core provisions. The public submissions mechanism is an innovative approach for providing the interested public, including NGOs, an opportunity to challenge a Party’s enforcement of its environmental laws and to obtain an independent review of their submissions.

It took a lot of work on the part of all of our delegations to draft and negotiate the provisions on the CAFTA-DR public submissions mechanism, and I’d like to acknowledge in particular the work of the U.S. negotiator, Alice Mattice. We also worked very closely with members of Congress to develop the unique features of this mechanism and I want to single out Senator Max Baucus as a key architect of this environmental package.

Throughout these negotiations, Senator Baucus provided extremely constructive input and advice to ensure that the CAFTA-DR environmental package would be state-of-the-art, going beyond anything that has been done in previous free trade agreements, including the NAFTA.

We were also extremely pleased with the letter sent to Ambassador Zoellick and the trade ministers of all of our Central American and Dominican Republic partners from ten regional NGOs, such as SalvaNATURA in El Salvador and Fundacion Zoologica de Nicaragua. These groups praised the CAFTA-DR environmental package and the opportunities it presents to positively influence environmental protection efforts in Central America, and they urged the legislatures of all of our countries to ratify the CAFTA-DR and the environmental cooperation agreement.

Their support underscores that strengthening our trade relationships creates opportunities to strengthen our environmental relationship as well, and for that reason the United States has been a leader in including strong environmental protections in our trade agreements.

With the signing of these two agreements today, we are pleased to join our partners in completing the most forward-leaning trade and environment package ever. We have a truly historic opportunity through the CAFTA-DR to make a real difference in strengthening civil society and environmental protection in the region.

We look forward to the ratification of the CAFTA-DR and the speedy implementation of these environmental provisions.

Thank you very much.

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