The proposed free-trade area, after all, would be the world's biggest, with some 1.7 billion consumers.
EAC, he suggested, should build a free-trade area, co-operate on finance, and sign a security pact.
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America too may pursue a mooted free-trade area of the Americas with greater vigour.
That might be the cornerstone for an even bigger free-trade area eventually including China, the world's second-biggest economy.
The farmers have much to gain from the proposed Free-Trade Area of the Americas, which Brazil's industrialists fear.
In the near term, ASEAN members want to build on the free-trade area they signed up to in 1992.
EU, and including the tricky negotiations for a Free-Trade Area of the Americas.
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Their approach to the talks on the Free-Trade Area of the Americas is likely to be assertive but not hostile.
The United States is working on a Free-Trade Area of the Americas as well as a slew of bilateral deals.
Mr Klaus lauds the Union as a free-trade area, and he believes workers should be free to move across borders.
George Bush trumped that in November by advocating a free-trade area spanning the Pacific and covering half the world economy.
But the free-trade area is riddled with exemptions: big markets such as Malaysia and Vietnam maintain high tariffs on imported cars.
The most substantial change could be to make Tohoku a free-trade area.
Some suggest it would be an irony if such a deal was negotiated - and Britain found itself outside the new free-trade area.
Argentina ended up siding with Venezuela at the summit in opposing any resumption of talks on an American-backed Free-Trade Area of the Americas.
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But Domingo Cavallo, Argentina's new economy minister, has talked (though not publicly) of Mercosur scrapping its customs union, and becoming simply a free-trade area.
Under the rules of the Southern African Customs Union, a fledgling free-trade area, cars made in Botswana can be exported to South Africa almost duty-free.
Nothing unusual, but it augured well, especially for the Free-Trade Area of the Americas the proposed trade pact that Lula once dismissed as a gringo cabal.
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Opponents of Turkey's joining the EU are offering up a consolation prize by way of creating some sort of Mediterranean free-trade area that Turkey could join.
The Mercosur free-trade area has hit another Paraguayan tradition: smuggling.
The idea of a bilateral trade deal between America and the European Union has been around at least since the Europeans unsuccessfully touted a transatlantic free-trade area five years ago.
He voted in favour of the NAFTA free-trade area in 1993, but on the campaign trail, especially in the downtrodden mid-west, he has promised to review all of America's free-trade agreements.
Its expansion from 15 members to 25 should create pressure for making the EU what it always should have been--a vast free-trade area with open borders and, for most members, a common currency.
The perennial idea of a transatlantic free-trade area sounds better but may well run into the obstacle of American domestic politics: with free-trade-sceptical Democrats taking over Congress, it is not an auspicious time for clinching trade deals.
This reinforces their existing prejudices, such as the belief that what Britain joined in 1973, and what Britons voted yes to in 1975, was in essence a free-trade area that only later transmogrified into a putative political union.
Instead, the EU will begin to evolve into what it should have been in the first place: a vast free-trade area in which political control is exercised by individual members, with EU bureaucrats in Brussels concerned only with reducing internal trade barriers.
He has also said he would promote the role of U.S. charities and relief organizations in the region, maintain economic sanctions on Cuba, seek special negotiating authority to strike speedier trade deals with nations in the Western Hemisphere and establish a free-trade area for the Americas.
For the ambitious Brazilians, it provides a vehicle to project their own weight, and not just in South America: in the talks supposed to lead by 2005 to a pan-American free-trade area, Mercosur's voice essentially, Brazil's has been the counterpoint to the otherwise overwhelming thunder of the United States.
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