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WASHINGTON, Aug. 16-- The United States, Canada and Mexico on Wednesday kicked off here the first round of renegotiations on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) amid widespread uncertainty and anxiety over the future of the decades-old trilateral trade deal. "We all agree that NAFTA needs updating. This is a 23-year-old agreement and our economies are very different than they were in the 1990s," U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Robert Lighthizer said in his opening remarks for the inaugural round of NAFTA talks, which will last until Sunday in Washington D.C. "We need to modernize or create provisions which protect digital trade and service trade, e-commerce, update customs procedures, protect intellectual property, improving energy provisions, enhance transparency rules and promote science-based agricultural trade," Lighthizer said. He hoped that the three countries could develop model provisions in each of these areas that can be used for years ahead and have the flexibility to adapt to future innovations. Lighthizer also claimed that NAFTA "has fundamentally failed many, many Americans", and the United States "cannot ignore the huge trade deficits, the lost manufacturing jobs, the businesses that have closed or moved" because of incentives in the current agreement. The top U.S. trade official said President Donald Trump, who has threatened to quit NAFTA, was not interested in "a mere tweaking of a few provisions and a couple of updated chapters," and the United States would seek "major improvement" of the agreement. | 
