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.