Commerce's Ross: NAFTA Talks Likely to Begin Later in 2017

Formal talks between Mexico, Canada and the U.S. regarding renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) will not likely get underway until "the latter part of this year," Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Wednesday."I would like the results tomorrow, but that is not the way the world works," Ross said in an interview with Bloomberg TV, adding that he hoped discussions would not take "substantially longer than a year."NAFTA is now "an old treaty. Our economy is very different from what it was when that treaty was entered into. You didn't have the whole digital economy," Ross said. "Services were not nearly as important as they are now. And further, we've now had decades of experience with the treaty. It's very hard to get a several- thousand-page document right at inception. And there were some things in it that were missed. And there were some things in it that were not done correctly to begin with. And a lot of things that might have been okay back then, but don't work now. So, there is a lot to fix."Ross said that "several" chapters need to be added to the decades-old trade pact with Mexico and Canada because of the digital economy and other developments. Rules of origin will be a big topic in the talks, Ross said. Rules of origin are the criteria needed to determine the national source of a product. Their importance is derived from the fact that duties and restrictions in several cases depend upon the source of imports.The Trump administration is already having "preliminary" discussions with lawmakers about NAFTA, but they have yet to give Congress formal notice that it will be reopening the 23-year-old pact, Ross said.