ASEAN chief calls for end to APEC summits

ASEAN chief calls for end to APEC summits

MANILA (AFP): Annual summits of Asia-Pacific leaders should be abolished since they have evolved into a talking shop for issues unrelated to trade, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Secretary General Rodolfo Severino said Saturday.

The first Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Seattle in 1993 had given the forum the necessary "prominence", but Severino said discussions since "have tended to focus almost exclusively" on liberalization topics that are of interest only to "certain developed members."

"In this light, summits may in fact be a hindrance to progress in the less spectacular but equally important areas of APEC," Severino told delegates to the annual Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference here.

PECC, comprising mostly business leaders and academics, is the private-sector counterpart of APEC, which was set up to abolish trade barriers among its members.

Severino said the gatherings of APEC leaders raised "expectations enormously" which served to intensify "pressure for dramatic breakthroughs."

He also noted that in the past three years, APEC forums were dominated by non-trade issues -- the Asian financial crisis in 1997, the arrest of Malaysia's former deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim in 1998, and the East Timor crisis this year.

The 21-member APEC "may find itself able to dispense with the annual summit and return to the system of its first four years," when the annual events were at the ministerial level, the ASEAN chief said.

But Philippine Foreign Secretary Domingo Siazon stressed that APEC summits gave leaders an "opportunity for exchanges" which circumvented bureaucratic channels.

"These meetings of APEC contributed on very serious political problems," Siazon said.

He said they also served as an invaluable venue for the president of the United States to visit the region and meet his counterparts.

"You need the American president to focus on East Asia at least once a year," Siazon said, noting that political stability was an essential bulwark for economic development.

Former Philippine president Fidel Ramos acknowledged that APEC "seems strangely unresponsive and less dynamic" than it used to, but stressed that political and security issues were integral to trade discussions.

Instead of discussing non-related topics in an "ad hoc and informal" way, Ramos said APEC should "formalize" the process by holding three ministerial meetings on trade, finance and security leading to the leaders' summit.

For his part, former Australian prime minister Robert Hawke said governments should realize that APEC's role had evolved into one that could be called "association of productive exchange in conflict."

Unlike Ramos, however, Hawke said it was best not to formalize the process since that could be "counterproductive". APEC groups Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Russia, Peru, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam.