A proposed new trade agreement with five Central American countries and the Dominican Republic has sent a shiver through North Carolinians who lost jobs and businesses to the North American Free Trade Agreement, the most recent regional trade deal.

But the Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, has also garnered support from an unlikely coalition of textile companies, farmers and food processors who see opportunity in the countries covered by the deal. Although North Carolina has lost 244,000 manufacturing jobs in the past decade, many people see free trade as an opportunity.

Between 2001 and 2004, North Carolina exports to the countries covered -- Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua -- grew by $678 million, the largest gain of any state, U.S. Department of Commerce data shows. The $1.7 billion worth of manufactured goods that the state sold to those nations last year makes North Carolina the region's third-largest trade partner, after Texas and Florida.

That's why Franklin Lee, 53, a Stanly County farmer, hopes CAFTA will overcome opposition from labor groups, some Southern textile manufacturers and members of Congress. The trade accord has been stalled in Congress for months, and leaders from the CAFTA countries are in Washington this week to lobby for it.

Lee, who grows corn, cotton and soy on 2,000 acres, doesn't export any of his crops now. That could change under CAFTA. He hopes to start selling corn to the CAFTA nations as soon as tariffs are dropped. Under the deal, export duties on fresh corn would immediately be eliminated to all countries except Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, where duties would be lifted in five and 15 years, respectively.

Other goods, including information technology products, construction equipment, paper products, pharmaceutical drugs and other agricultural products, would also gradually become duty-free.

But not everyone agrees that opening up the Central American market will be a boon.

The "total population of the CAFTA countries" is about 45 million, said Alan Tonelson, research fellow at the U.S. Business & Industry Council, which represents small and midsize manufacturing companies. "That's about the size of California and New Jersey put together. And half of them earn $2 or less a day. These countries don't have the capacity to buy anything made in this nation."

Tonelson calls CAFTA an "outsourcing agreement."

Allen Gant, president of Glen Raven, however, is among North Carolina textile makers who believe CAFTA will help safeguard what's left of the country's fabric industry. With the lifting of quotas on Chinese textile products this year, competition from that country has intensified. A trade accord with Central America will allow Gant's factories in Glen Raven, High Point and Norlina to continue to export fabric to factories in Central America that cut and sew it into clothes for exports back to the United States, he said.

Without it, Gant said, textile imports from low-cost countries in Asia will gradually erode production in the United States as well as in Central America. For the U.S. textile industry to survive, "there has to be an easy, efficient and competitive way to turn it into garment," Gant said.

The Bush administration recently promised to change language in CAFTA to protect exports of pocketing and lining material from the United States to Central America. On Monday, that prompted the trade group that Gant leads, the National Council of Textile Organizations, to endorse CAFTA.

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