MIAMI -- Fears about Americans losing jobs in a NAFTA-like scenario if the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement becomes a reality dominated a Miami forum convened to discuss the pact.

The FTAA, which covers the 34 democracies of the Western Hemisphere, is scheduled for a round of negotiations Nov. 20-21 in Miami.

Panelists Robert Coker, senior vice president of U.S. Sugar Corp. in Clewiston, and Thea Lee, a Washington-based AFL-CIO economist, shared the viewpoint that the FTAA could kill jobs, which some argue was a consequence of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.

So did several dozen South Florida residents, from union members to students, who attended the town hall meeting Tuesday night at the Sheraton Biscayne Bay.

"If the U.S. agrees in regional trade negotiations to open up the U.S. sugar market, American sugar producers, including our company, will be wiped out," Coker said.

U.S. Sugar employs more than 2,500 full-time workers and another 1,000 during the sugar cane harvest.

The industry wants its issues decided at the global World Trade Organization because more than 120 countries produce sugar.

The AFL-CIO's Lee said that pre-NAFTA predictions were that the United States would gain 200,000 jobs and have a $7-million-a-year-plus trade surplus with Canada and Mexico.

"What really happened? There was a U.S. trade deficit in the first year, and now that trade deficit has increased tenfold, from $9 billion to $87 billion," Lee said.

"The point of NAFTA wasn't, in fact, to open markets. The point was to reward corporations for moving production around," Lee said.

Luis Lauredo, executive director of the FTAA Miami Ministerial and America's Business Forum,
said the FTAA will bring more jobs to the service-oriented state.

An Enterprise Florida study found Florida would gain 89,000 jobs under FTAA if Miami becomes its permanent headquarters.

Those attending the meeting lined up to question Lauredo, a member of President Bush's advisory board on trade and the only panelist avidly supporting the FTAA as it stands, about how the agreement would add jobs in Florida and how it would improve economic conditions in poor countries.

"This reminds me of my radical days at Columbia University," Lauredo said.

The FTAA negotiators are now confronting tough decisions in labor, agriculture and the environment, Lauredo said, calling the FTAA "the most open diplomatic endeavor ever undertaken."

Globalization is occurring, Lauredo said, and "you cannot stand in front of it."

But Jay Staley, a union president representing 1,700 Miami-Dade County water and sewer department workers, said: "If this FTAA takes one job away from a U.S. citizen, it's not worth it."

Panelist Stephen Powell, international trade program director at the University of Florida College of Law, said there's a growing awareness of free trade's impact.

"It is obvious in this room and elsewhere that people are not buying the economic underpinnings of free trade anymore, that by simply growing free trade you will grow economies," Powell said.