APEC official sees hope in free-trade plans at summit

APEC official sees hope in free-trade plans at summit

SINGAPORE (Agencies): A senior APEC official said yesterday he is confident next month's APEC summit would help accelerate plans to liberalize trade in the Asia-Pacific region despite reservations by some members.

Rusli Noor, executive director of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) secretariat, said the Nov. 15 summit in Indonesia would attempt to reconcile the range of views on these subjects (trade and investment) among members.

"There are certainly some sorts of concerns (on the free trade plan) among the members of APEC," he told a foreign correspondents luncheon.

Although it was not possible to assess the impact of these concerns now on the outcome of the summit, he said APEC's stated goals of trade liberalization could be eventually realized.

"In the end, I think I am optimistic that efforts to liberalize trade in the region and enhance investment, which is the main objective of APEC, will bring more positive results," Noor, who is based in Singapore, was quoted by Reuters as saying.

APEC groups Australia, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. Chile will become a full member this month.

China and Malaysia have said they would not accept a binding timetable for free trade, while a Japanese trade official said although Tokyo basically supported freer trade, it is not ready to blindly accept all proposed liberalization measures.

Disputes

Meanwhile, Tetsuya Endo, ambassador for Asia-Pacific cooperation and Japan's top official dealing with APEC, was quoted by AFP as saying in Tokyo that plans by APEC to mediate in trade disputes between members would complement existing international rules.

However, he said that it was not yet clear if such plans would be included in the declaration to be issued at this year's summit in Indonesia.

"Dispute settlement might be taken up as one of the measures in trade and investment facilitation," he said in an interview.

"But as far as I understand, what we are aiming at in APEC for dispute settlement is not like that," he added, referring to a Japanese newspaper report that APEC planned to develop its own dispute-settlement procedures.

Endo noted that settling trade disputes was "basically in the hands of the WTO" -- the new World Trade Organization expected to be set up next year to succeed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

"The role for APEC to play is to supplement or complement the WTO, so therefore the dispute settlement mechanism in APEC should not be such a legalistic one," he said, stressing that "mediation" was the preferred path.

The Japanese official added that the five-year-old group also might be able to provide "transparency" to dispute-settlement procedures.

China and Taiwan, two of the world's biggest trading nations and both members of APEC, are still not members of the GATT, meaning that any trade disputes must be settled at bilateral rather than multilateral levels.

Moreover, some members of APEC have expressed fears that they could be adversely affected by the festering trade disputes between the United States and Japan, the world's two biggest economies.

Endo said the declaration on free trade being drafted for the Bogor summit had to accommodate cautious members such as China.