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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