Free trade agreements signed

WASHINGTON -- President Bush signed legislation Wednesday to begin free trade with Singapore and Chile, saying that opening world markets is essential for U.S. prosperity and the spread of freedom.\nBush said he anticipated signing many more free-trade pacts. Negotiations are under way with Australia and Morocco and countries in Central America and southern Africa, he said, and will begin soon with Bahrain and the Dominican Republic.\n"We support free trade in America because it is vital to the creation of jobs," Bush said in an East Room ceremony. "It's vital to the success of our economy. Exports accounted for roughly one quarter of our economy's growth in the 1990s," Bush said, repeating a mantra of the Clinton administration.\nCritics say the agreements could cost U.S. jobs by giving companies an incentive to move to cheaper labor markets. Bush is sensitive to the jobs issue, going into a re-election campaign with a 2.7 million net job loss during his presidency.\nBush said export-related jobs generally pay better than others and have helped raise standards of living in the United States. "The continued advance of free trade is essential to this nation's prosperity," he said.\n"The United States also supports free trade because a world that trades in freedom will grow in prosperity and in security," the president said. "For developing nations, free trade tied to economic reform has help to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty."\nThe agreements, approved by Congress, go into effect Jan. 1, 2004. Chile becomes the first South American country and Singapore the first East Asian nation to join in a bilateral pact to end tariffs, eliminate nontariff barriers, open up financial and other services and protect intellectual property rights.\nThe amount of U.S. trade with the two countries is modest. Singapore is America's 12th largest trading partner with two-way transactions worth about $40 billion annually and Chile has bilateral trade of about $8.8 billion. Nonetheless, the agreements could serve as models for next-stage free trade zones involving Central America and the entire Western Hemisphere.\nThe signing ceremony was attended by the ambassadors of Chile and Singapore, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Commerce Secretary Don Evans, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, as well as members of Congress.\nUnder the free trade deal with Chile, more than 85 percent of bilateral trade in consumer and industrial products will become tariff-free immediately. Most of the remaining tariffs will be eliminated within four years. American farmers will get duty-free treatment within four years for most of their products.\nSingapore and the United States already enjoy a nearly tariff-free relationship. But the new agreement is important in such areas as erecting strong deterrence against intellectual property piracy and counterfeiting, which cost the U.S. motion picture, music and publishing industries billions of dollars annually.