APEC ministers gear up for main meeting

APEC ministers gear up for main meeting

By Endy Bayuni

OSAKA, Japan (JP): APEC ministers met informally last night to
settle some of the less contentious issues on their agenda,
leaving the more difficult problems for the conference proper,
which begins today.

Meanwhile, their senior officials went into an extra session
well into the night to try to hammer out an agreement on how the
Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum should go about
moving towards regional free trade.

Coordinating Minister for Industry and Trade Hartarto, who is
leading the Indonesian delegation to the APEC ministerial
conference, said he was hopeful that an agreement on trade
liberalization measures could still be forged here in Osaka.

"The process still has a long way to go. Let's be patient," he
told Indonesian journalists last night.

"We already have a mechanism by which to resolve disputes," he
said, referring to the three-level meetings within APEC, starting
with senior officials, the ministers, and their leaders.

The APEC leaders are scheduled to hold their informal meeting
here on Sunday.

APEC, founded in 1989, groups Australia, Brunei, Canada,
Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New
Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Singapore, South
Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States.

The two-day APEC ministerial meeting will discuss the Action
Agenda, a document detailing how the 18 member countries intend
to implement the Bogor Declaration which was made by their
leaders in Indonesia last year pledging to move towards a
regional free trade by 2020.

By yesterday evening, it had become apparent that senior
officials could not agree on three of the nine principles in the
Action Agenda: Whether or not trade liberalization should be
comprehensive without exempting any sector; comparability in the
pace of trade liberalization measures pursued by each member-
country; and whether or not trade privileges granted should be
non-discriminatory.

During an informal dinner meeting hosted by Japanese Foreign
Minister Yohei Kono and International Trade and Industry Minister
Ryutaro Hashimoto, APEC ministers last night agreed on a number
of issues outside the trade liberalization issue.

Indonesian Minister of Foreign Affairs Ali Alatas told
reporters that the ministers at the dinner meeting agreed to
recommend to their leaders the following four issues for
discussion:

* Terminating the task of the Eminent Persons Group, whose
three reports have been recognized as valuable in APEC's decision
to move towards a free trade area.

* Establishing an APEC Business Advisory Council that will
formally bring the private sector into APEC's processes.

* Involving non-APEC members in some of the forum's
activities.

* Studying the mechanism for admitting new members, once the
current membership moratorium ends in 1996.

With these issues already put to one side, the APEC ministers
will have all day today to concentrate on the substance and the
wording of the Action Agenda and the joint communique, Alatas
said.

Earlier yesterday, the various APEC ministers held separate
bilateral meetings, some with the apparent intention of trying to
put across their points on the contentious trade issues, others
to forge alliances ahead of today's meeting.

Host Japan, for example, was sending messages that it is not
opposed to the idea of comprehensiveness, but it is seeking some
flexibility in liberalizing "sensitive sectors" like agriculture.

Japanese officials said most other countries have come to
accept the Japanese point of view.

These messages were also put across during the separate Japan-
Indonesia bilateral meetings, between Alatas and Kono and between
Hartarto and Hashimoto.

Ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) also held a separate meeting ahead of the APEC
conference.

Rafidah Aziz, Malaysia's international trade minister, told
reporters after the meeting that her country is seeking the
inclusion of the words "voluntarism" and "non-binding" in the
preamble to the Action Agenda.

"This would make people comfortable," Rafidah said.

Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad expressed some
reservations last year about the Bogor Declaration, saying that
APEC is a consultative forum rather than a negotiating body, and
that therefore no agreement that it makes is binding on its
members.

Meanwhile, the APEC Economic Committee issued its first report
which further underpins the reason why its is in APEC's members'
interests to liberalize trade and investment.

The 1995 APEC Economic Outlook attributes the strong growth in
trade and investment that the region has enjoyed in recent years
to the role of open markets and market-oriented reforms.

"This analysis substantiates the relationship between
realizing the Bogor vision of free trade and investment in the
region and the future growth prospects of the APEC economies,"
committee chairman John Curtis said in a statement accompanying
the report.

"As a result of strong economic growth in recent years, the
APEC region has increasingly become the center of gravity of the
global economy," the report said.

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