For the Bush administration, it's a win in the trade arena after a couple of disappointing blows.

For some in the Florida sugar industry, it's seen as the beginning of the end.

The United States and four Central American nations reached agreement Wednesday on a free-trade pact that will cut the barriers to trade and investment among the five nations.

"We need investment, we need markets, and this will get things moving in the right direction," said Mario Arana, trade minister of Nicaragua, which joined the agreement along with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

While the U.S. trade representative's office touted the benefits of the Central American Free Trade Agreement to U.S. agricultural sectors such as beef, pork and poultry, Florida sugar industry officials expressed alarm and shock Wednesday at provisions of the treaty.

CAFTA initially allows an additional 85,000 tons of duty-free sugar into the United States from the four countries, which now export 111,000 tons a year under World Trade Organization rules. In 15 years the countries' imports could reach a total of 236,000 tons and continue to increase 2,000 tons a year after that, a top U.S. trade official said.

With the possibility of increased imports in other trade agreements being negotiated with countries such as Thailand, South Africa and Australia, there's the potential to bring an additional 1 million tons of sugar a year into the U.S. market, said Dalton Yancey, executive vice president of the Florida Sugar Cane League in Washington.

"It means efficient producers in the U.S. are going to have to give up their farming enterprise to make room for Central American sugar producers and others," Yancey said. "If you get the price below our cost of production, then we are real estate."

Florida produces 2 million tons of sugar a year, valued at $800 million, from sugar cane grown on 441,000 acres in Palm Beach, Martin, Hendry and Glades counties.

The four Central American countries have about 31 million residents, close to the population of California, and 80 percent of U.S. manufactured goods and 50 percent of farm products will enter duty-free as soon as the agreement is in effect. Congress must vote on the agreement next year.

"We had hoped they would exclude sugar and negotiate it only at the WTO," said Carolyn Cheney, Washington-based representative of the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida in Belle Glade. "This is trading U.S. jobs for foreign jobs and that's all it is."

Sugar prices are already near loan-forfeiture levels, said Van Boyette, a Washington-based vice president of Florida Crystals Corp. in West Palm Beach. More imports would lower prices and lead to forfeitures, he said.

"I don't see how they are going to squeeze all this into the toothpaste tube," Boyette said.