These pages provide official documents of the meetings as well as background information and documents emerging from the meetings of business people which have been held alongside the Ministerials. The Trade Unit pages give you a chance to see what our colleagues do on the analytical side. The Trade Unit was established to provide assistance in the FTAA process, and it is very active in the process. We hope to have more summaries in the near future. The Dispute Settlement section provides infomation on disputes on agreements, treaties and arrangements of integration on the Western Hemisphere.
Trade is more than just official documents and pronouncements.
We place new documents on our site every Monday by noon Eastern time. Our policy is to have at least one document item or link every week. When there is a special event that merits immediate coverage, we place available documents up as soon as we receive and process them. For example, during the Belo Horizonte Trade Ministerial of May 1997, we had the Ministerial Declaration posted that same night, and had daily updates with full-text speeches of the Ministerial and the accompanying Americas Business Forum. We have configured our site using a standard of HTML 3.0 so that it can be viewed with any browser.