ASEAN officials make progress on farm talks

ASEAN officials make progress on farm talks

SINGAPORE (Reuter): ASEAN officials said yesterday that they
had made some headway in ending a deadlock over the inclusion of
agricultural products in the group's free trade agreement.

"I think there has been a lot of progress made in issues which
we thought would be the main stumbling block at this meeting,"
Ridzwan Dzafir, Director-General of Singapore's Trade Development
Board (TDB) said.

He was speaking to reporters at the one-day meeting of senior
ASEAN economic officials ahead of an ASEAN Economic Ministers
meeting later this week.

"For instance, on the extension of the CEPT (Common Effective
Preferential Tariffs) concession to unprocessed agricultural
products, there has been an agreement on broad areas as to how we
should proceed with the implementation of the scheme," he said.

Ridzwan said the meeting agreed on how to incorporate
sensitive agricultural products such as rice into the ASEAN Free
Trade Area. "We will decide on the question of when is the
starting and when is the end-date for the exemptions and what is
the kind of product list we need to produce," he said.

ASEAN groups Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand,
Vietnam and the Philippines.

Ridzwan also said that ASEAN would like Mexico and Canada to
take part in the next discussions held between the Asian grouping
and the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR).

ASEAN economic ministers (AEM) were due to meet the U.S. Trade
Representative in May but the meeting has been postponed,
probably until June, because of the departure of former USTR
Mickey Kantor, officials said.

Kantor was named U.S. Commerce Secretary earlier this month
replacing the late Ron Brown.

"We want to encourage the USTR to invite (its) other partners
in NAFTA, Mexico and Canada, to be also present at the
forthcoming AEM-USTR meeting," Ridzwan said.

"I think it is a good beginning for a linkage between ASEAN
and NAFTA," Ridzwan said.