As part of its overall trade strategy, the Bush Administration over the last year began negotiating bilateral free trade area (FTA) agreements with four regional blocs or countries. Negotiations on a U.S.-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) involving Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua began in late January 2003 and are currently scheduled to conclude this December. While negotiators have reportedly made progress in a number of areas, efforts to formulate a framework for handling agricultural trade have been slow.

This report addresses politics in Central America in 1969.

In a series of maps and figures, this bilingual atlas summarizes what is known about the energy resources and how these resources and oil imports supply the energy needs of five Central American countries: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama. The main exploited energy resources are firewood, hydroelectric energy, bagasse from sugar cane residues, and geothermal energy. Limited oil exploration in the region has uncovered modest oil resources only in Guatemala. Peat and small coal deposits are also known to exist but are not presently being exploited. After the description of energy resources, this atlas describes energy supply and demand patterns in each country. It concludes with a description of socioeconomic data that strongly affect energy demand. 4 refs.

This report discusses ethanol consumption which has grown significantly in the past several years with the establishment of a renewable fuels standard in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (P.L. 109-58). This standard requires U.S. gasoline to contain a minimum amount of renewable fuel, including ethanol.