The President is, as you know, a strong believer in free trade. He fundamentally believes that we live in age that strongly favors nations that have economies that value entrepreneurship and open trade. He also understands that the United States has a strong interest in promoting the system of open trade. We will work bilaterally to build open trade relationships with individual nations such as Chile. And, of course, we will pursue open trade right here in our own hemisphere.
Open trade helps create stability, fosters prosperity, and lays the foundations for liberty.
It also means better jobs and bigger paychecks for American workers, and lower prices and more choices for our consumers. It means that the engine of growth can be put to work to lift the lives of those in the hemisphere who still live in abject poverty. People who prosper in open economies eventually demand open societies. For all of these reasons, the President is committed to achieving the Free Trade Area of the Americas that is up and running at the earliest possible date. Recently in Buenos Aires, the trade ministers agreed on a framework to energize the negotiations and to set down a marker that the agreement should be implemented by 2005.