According to Abbreviationfinder, FTAA is an acronym that corresponds to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a project that was born with the purpose of expanding the North American Free Trade Agreement to include other American countries, with the exception of Cuba.
The initiative emerged in Miami (United States) in December 1994 with the purpose of implementing a progressive reduction of tariff barriers in all member states. Political transformations in South America, however, forced less ambitious goals to be agreed.
Specifically, we can determine that the FTAA has market development, agriculture, public sector purchases, competition policy, dispute resolution, smaller economies or international issues as its main development and labor issues. All this without forgetting investment, intellectual property rights, subsidies or anti-dumping.
The FTAA promoters, with the United States at the helm, affirm that the agreement will foster competitiveness and specialization in the region, will contribute to improving infrastructure, will force the disappearance of monopolies and will improve the standard of living of Americans.
Those who criticize the project, on the other hand, maintain that the FTAA will privatize public goods and services and will end up benefiting the United States. The left parties do not hesitate to affirm that it is a tool of North American imperialism, while the more moderate positions demand that, at least, the US subsidies to agriculture be eliminated in principle in order to advance in integration.
After the IV Summit of the Americas, which took place in the city of Mar del Plata (Argentina) in 2005, the project was suspended due to the strong criticism received and the massive mobilizations of the civilian population against the block.
One of the relevant figures on the international scene that has most vigorously attacked the FTAA is the current President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez. Thus, this political leader has not hesitated to describe this initiative as one more tool of imperialism that is to be carried out in the countries of Latin America.
A position that, to a certain extent, was also supported by other Latin American leaders such as the case of two former presidents such as Argentina’s Néstor Kirchner and Brazil’s Lula Da Silva. They are not that they fully rejected the proposal put forward by the FTAA, but rather that they made it clear that it must be truly free. And is that they considered that it was not and was subject to various interests.
Economists indicate that, if the FTAA were to materialize, it would create a common market with 800 million inhabitants and a combined GDP of $ 21 billion annually.
Likewise, the term in question serves to give a name to a Spanish company that operates in the industrial sector where it has been working for more than seventy years offering the best services to its clients. Specifically, it is focused on what is the manufacture of tools and instruments to carry out both control and tracing. Thus, it carries out the realization of squads, levels or gauges of different types.
Alca, on the other hand, identifies a species of bird belonging to the Alcidae family. It is possible to distinguish between the alca torda (which lives on the European coasts) and the giant alca (already extinct).
