AFTA to come into force without much fanfare

Adianto P.Simamora, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The ASEAN Free Trade Area, more widely known as AFTA, will come into force Tuesday without much fanfare, and with most people across the country unaware of the significance of the event.

Offices across the country will be closed Tuesday as people across the world celebrate the start of the new year.

There isn't any ceremony to be held by the Indonesian government to mark this historic moment, however.

No banners or notices have been disseminated by the government in public places to raise the Indonesian public's awareness about this important subject.

"There won't be any ribbon-cutting or special ceremony to mark AFTA because, as a matter of fact, we have been implementing AFTA for years by gradually reducing many of our import tariffs," Hatanto Reksodiputro, director general for International cooperation at the ministry of industry and trade, told The Jakarta Post.

AFTA was first formulated in 1992 during the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit with implementation originally scheduled for 2008. The time frame was later moved up to 2003.

In a meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam in 1998, the AFTA Council agreed to accelerate AFTA to Jan. 1, 2002. This was re-confirmed in the council's meeting on Sept. 14, 2001, also in Hanoi.

AFTA will be first implemented in the six founding members of ASEAN -- Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippine, Thailand and Brunei Darussalam -- while the other members, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar will implement it between 2006 and 2010.

Under the AFTA scheme, each of the six founding member nations will reduce most of their import tariffs to between zero, and five percent.

Public ignorance continues to predominate, with many people still thinking that AFTA will take effect in 2003.

Dessy Theresia, an employee of a Japanese firm in Central Jakarta said she regretted the lack of information provided by the government about the acceleration of the AFTA.

"As far as I know from books, AFTA will be implemented starting 2003 -- I've never seen any advertising campaigns," she told The Post.

Dessy said her friends did not care about AFTA because they were not informed about it.

Agustin Goh, the director of PT TOEIC Center Indonesia, a language instruction academy, said that he, too, was also unaware about the early implementation of AFTA. "I heard nothing about the acceleration," he said. "We hope the government will officially announce it to the public."

He added that AFTA will benefit both Indonesian consumers and business players.

"AFTA is good because it will force us (business people) to boost our competitiveness and efficiency," he said.

In the beginning, he said, AFTA will become a serious problem for Indonesia, because many cheaper products from other ASEAN countries will flood the local market.

But this will change in time, he said, with AFTA coming to benefit the country.