On Friday, May 23, at about the same time that Dr Michael Louis, the newly appointed ambassador from St Lucia, was presenting his credentials to the Secretary General of the OAS in Washington, a very important event was taking place in Brazil's capital, Brasilia. In that ultra-fashionable capital, years of discussion ended with 12 South American countries coming together to formally launch the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela and Suriname assembled at the Third Summit of Heads of State to sign the treaty that established the newest international cooperative venture. By any measure UNASUR constitutes a formidable geopolitical constellation that realises an old idea once broached by Simón Bolívar.

The 12 constituent countries of the Union of South American Nations cover an area of nearly seven million square miles and include a diverse population of nearly 400 million inhabitants. By comparison, NAFTA, the community of Mexico, the United States of America and Canada, has a population of 445 million inhabitants in an area that covers about 8 and a half million square miles. The 27 members of the European Union amount to 497 million people in an area of less than two million square miles. At the moment, the Union of South American Nations comprises seven major ethnic groups, four official languages, an overall Gross Domestic Product per capita of more than US$10,000, and 12 different currencies.

Consciously modelled on the European Union, UNASUR will have its permanent headquarters in Quito, Ecuador. Its annually rotating president is Michelle Bachelet of Chile who accepted the position after Colombian president Álvaro Uribe declined, citing the strained relations between his country, Ecuador and Venezuela. The organisation lost its first secretary general before the inaugural meeting, but the position remains. It was also agreed that the foreign ministers would meet every six months along with the senior officials of all the regional economic groups to fashion concrete proposals for executive decisions at the major annual meetings.

Despite some articulate sceptics, especially in Washington, DC, the new organisation has announced a positively ambitious but eminently pragmatic programme covering four familiar problematic areas. These are the creation of a common market; freedom of movement within the community; general economic development; and cooperation in intraregional integration.

The creation of a single market proposes the elimination by 2014 of tariffs on what are deemed non-sensitive products and on all tarriffs by 2019. This has to be reconciled with competing agendas in other organisations such as the Andean Group, Caricom, and MERCOSUR.

In late 2006, several South American countries waived visa requirements for tourist travel by nationals between their states. The present pact extends this freedom of movement to an automatic 90-day stay for all nationals of any South American country, except French Guiana, which is a part of the French state and therefore a member of the European community.

General economic development should benefit from the creation last December of the South American Bank headquartered in Caracas with an initial outlay of US$7b, with Venezuela contributing US$3b and Brazil US$2b. Operating more like the World Bank than the IMF, the bank will finance developmental projects aimed at promoting economic integration, reducing material inequalities, and balancing investments across the region.

UNASUR promises to enhance ongoing projects of intra-regional integration. Two major projects involve an interstate grid designed to improve internal as well as international road and rail communications and an integrated energy delivery system. This communications network should be a boon to landlocked Bolivia, but it should also bring distant interior cities in Peru, Brazil and Argentina closer to their national ports and capitals. The energy distribution system entails creating pipelines that eventually will connect markets in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay with sources in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia.

The challenges to UNASUR are great but not insuperable over the long run.

Although the economic tide is flowing in their favour with a growth rate across the area expected to be above four per cent, the countries differ widely in their economic approaches and achievements.

Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay are open-market advocates while Venezuela, and to varying degrees, Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador appear hostile to free trade. Differences in market size, resource distribution, as well as economic ideology, will constitute formidable obstacles to the establishment of common trade policies, common market regulations, or a common currency.

Nowhere did the challenge appear more sharply pronounced than in the faltering proposal to establish a common UNASUR Defence Council (Consejo Sudamericana de Defensa or CSD) comparable to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The principal advocates of the CSD, for entirely different reasons, were Brazil and Venezuela. Brazil saw the CSD as an impetus for domestic arms development and sales, as well as an efficacious instrument in border patrol and narcotics interception. For Venezuela, at least Hugo Chávez saw the CSD as a necessary counterweight to the military influence of the USA. Colombia, the major narcotics exporter in South America, announced that it was not interested in joining the CSD and would retain its strong military and economic links with the USA.

The adage that "Rome was not built in a day" applies to all efforts to establish concrete goals of community cooperation. Multinational cooperation is a delicate process that moves in ebbs and flows. The Treaty of Rome that laid the foundation for the present vibrant 27-nation European Community began in March 1957 with five countries and without the support of the United Kingdom. The future looked bleak but they persisted. The South American consortium contains great economic strength and abundant natural resources. If the countries can harness their human resources and political will, they should find success in far less than 50 years. These new times demand new measures such as UNASUR. The modern world is more receptive to cooperative communities than to atavistic lone rangers. In any case, there is nothing wrong with the audacity of hope.

The fear factor

Feeding the multitude

DANGEROUS PETS