WASHINGTON - The administration's proposed free trade agreement with Central American nations was met with a barrage of objections from senators Wednesday, signaling a hard road ahead.

Tough questions about the Central American Free Trade Agreement came from both free-trade Democrats and Republicans whose support the administration needs for the pact with Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said the agreement would destroy U.S. sugar, saying, "You've just negotiated away another industry."

Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., meanwhile, warned increased CAFTA sugar trade could set a precedent for future trade deals with Argentina and Brazil.

The Senate Finance Committee's top Democrat, Max Baucus of Montana, generally backs trade pacts, but he expressed concern for his state's beet growers and urged the White House to do much more to promote the agreement to a skeptical Congress.

Sen. Kent Conrad
"Without presidential leadership, this agreement is going to face a very steep uphill battle," he told acting U.S. Trade Representative Peter Allgeier at this year's first congressional hearing on CAFTA.

Montana's lone congressman - Republican Rep. Dennis Rehberg - opposes the pact because of its potential harm to the sugar industry.

Allgeier strongly defended the deal, citing estimates that it would nearly double current U.S. agriculture exports to the region, to about $3 billion a year. While almost all goods from the six nations now enter the United States duty free, CAFTA would result in 80 percent of U.S. industrial exports and more than half of farm exports becoming duty-free immediately.

Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, supports the pact, saying a vote against CAFTA is "a vote to maintain unilateral trade and keep tariff barriers to our exports high. It's a vote that defies logic."

A House International Relations Committee panel on Wednesday also took up CAFTA in the context of the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico enacted a decade ago and the possibilities of an Andean and a hemisphere-wide free trade zone.

AFL-CIO executive vice president Linda Chavez Thompson called for the rejection of CAFTA, saying that under NAFTA "real wages in Mexico have fallen, the number of poor people has grown, and the number of people migrating to the United States to seek work has doubled."

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