ABSTRACT
Failure is a famously great teacher. This chapter draws from a case study of the failure of the negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which ended ignominiously without agreement in 2005 after over a decade of negotiations. It reviews the reasons for this failure, the aftermath in the Americas region, and on this basis suggests lessons which can be learned for the AfCFTA. The strength of the comparison between the AfCFTA and the FTAA is that they both faced the challenge of consolidating a mega-regional trade agreement over a broad range of countries with very different levels of development and economic structures.
