Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is to come to Jamaica later this year for an official visit, which Prime Minister P J Patterson hopes to expand into a sort of Caricom/Brazil mini summit, providing leaders with a platform for advancing relations with the Southern Cone trade group, Mercosur.

“I would want to extend the discussions beyond Jamaica and would want to attend, those Caricom leaders (who would be available),” Patterson told reporters on Friday, in confirming Lula’s planned visit.

Dates had not yet been settled for the visit, but diplomats said it would likely be about mid-year, with the intervening period being used to fashion bilateral co-operation agreements between Jamaica and Brazil for signing by Patterson and President da Silva.

In fact, work has already begun on these protocols.

da Silva last week sent a personal emissary to Jamaica for prior talks with Patterson to begin to stake out key areas of Brazil/Jamaica relations, as well as the possibility for expanding Mercosur’s relations with the 15-member Caribbean Community.

Patterson and da Silva had intended to start the process in the margins of February’s G-15 summit in Caracas, but the Jamaica leader, then the chairman of Caricom, left early to deal with the emerging crisis in Haiti.

Brazil has long been keen on expanding its own, and Mercosur’s relationship, with the Caribbean, but da Silva’s election two years ago has added a philosophical depth to such issues.

Brazil is Latin America’s economic power-house, and da Silva has sought to use his country’s position of leadership on the continent to push for the expansion of Mercosur as a counterfoil to US economic power and Washington’s expected dominance of the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Mercosur has as full members of its economic group Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. But it has free trade area agreements with Bolivia and Chile.

The slowdown of negotiations on the FTAA – a casualty of the US presidential campaign in which the “export” of American jobs has become a central issue of debate – will likely give additional impetus to da Silva to pursue his agenda of a big Latin American trading bloc and expanded relations with third parties like Caricom.

But regional trade experts say that while Caricom may explore a trade pact with Mercosur during da Silva’s visit to Jamaica, many of the concerns that arose around its relationship with the FTAA would also arise.

“Brazil and Argentina, comparatively speaking, are major economies,” said a regional trade expert. “So the issues of size, vulnerability and the pace of reciprocity would arise for Caricom.”

The 2005 deadline for the launch of the FTAA was clearly in trouble after last September’s collapse of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations in Cancun, which would have settled clear parameters for the hemispheric agreement.

Now diplomats, trade experts and leaders agree that the substance of the FTAA, as initially conceived by the Americans, are likely to be altered with concerns in the presidential campaign about US firms sending jobs abroad.

“I don’t think things will ever be the same again, irrespective of the outcome of the US election,” Patterson told editors at his Friday briefing.

“Any president is going to have a difficulty getting through Congress the support that (Bill) Clinton was able to get for NAFTA (North American Free Trade Area between the US, Canada and Mexico),” Patterson added. “And even then it was touch and go.”

It was unlikely, in the circumstance, that there will be substantial negotiations on the FTAA until after the US presidential vote, Patterson said.

“I don’t know how much is going to happen between now and November,” he said.

Patterson, however, saw the possible hiatus in substantive negotiations for the FTAA, as well as the stalled WTO negotiations, as an opportunity for Caricom to regroup, work through its internal concerns and ensure that it maintains a unified front.

“…We in Caricom are not saying that it is either tea time or lunch time and sit back and do nothing,” said the Jamaican prime minister, who has responsibility among Caricom leaders for external negotiations. “We have to evaluate and prepare our positions … We are trying to craft an approach that maintains coherence.”

The region, though, will not be totally free from trade negotiations in the short-term. Later this month, for instance, the Cariforum group – Caricom and the Dominican Republic – begin negotiations with the European Union (EU) for a Regional Economic Partnership Agreement (REPA) to replace the existing Cotonou Agreement between the EU and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of countries.

These REPAs are to come into force in 2008 and the negotiation for them will bring under serious scrutiny, long cherished protocols such as the sugar and banana agreements between the EU and the ACP.

These negotiations will also take place in the context of an expanded EU – 10 new members will join – and the installation of new commissioners in Brussels, which could mean the departure of some of the officials with whom the Caribbean and ACP negotiators had built up a rapport. New commissioners may also have new priorities.

Patterson, however, was relatively optimistic about the negotiations with the EU and did not believe that the REPAs would lead ultimately to the collapse of the ACP.

Part of his confidence rests in the fact that there will be a broad framework agreement with the EU at the ACP level from which would proceed the REPAs.

“The principle that applies is that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” Patterson said.