NASSAU, Bahamas (AP) οΎ— Bahamian immigration authorities will learn basic Spanish and French and train for an anticipated movement of labor before the Free Trade Area of the Americas proposal is implemented, officials said.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas is scheduled to go online in 2005, and will bring 34 democratic countries of 800 million people into a single US$9 trillion trade block in the Western Hemisphere. Many are Spanish-speaking countries and a few have French-speaking population segments.
Immigration authorities must train for the "immediate effects of a trade agreement that would join all the democratic countries in this hemisphere," said Labor and Immigration Minister Vincent Peet on Thursday.
"As a government we must…chart our course with extreme care," Peet said, speaking at a weeklong FTAA conference on the Caribbean island.
