Asia-Pacific economies urge WTO members to resume trade talks
Asia-Pacific economies urge WTO members to resume trade talks
P. Parameswaran, Agence France-Presse, Pucon, Chile
Trade ministers of 21 Asia-Pacific economies meeting in Chile are set to adopt a "strong" statement urging WTO members to return to the negotiating table by July and devise long awaited new rules governing global trade.
The 148-member WTO talks on the so-called Doha Development Agenda collapsed in the Mexican city of Cancun in September last year after a bitter dispute between developing and industrialized states.
"There is a great desire to see progress made so that we can have a successful meeting at the end of July," Singapore Trade Minister George Yeo told AFP after the first day of the two-day ministerial meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.
"I think all of us should try and make a supreme effort to get it done," he said.
Senior officials accompanying ministers to the talks at the Chilean venue in Pucon, a resort town south of Santiago, said the meeting would adopt, aside from a joint communique, a "special" and "strong" statement on the Doha round on Saturday.
"As we are a diverse and consensus based group, the APEC statement will not tie any member to any position, but at least it will be united call that we should come to grips with the Doha agenda by a target date," an official said.
APEC economies, which control nearly half of world trade, include industrialized nations the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, South Korea and New Zealand and top exporters China and key Southeast Asia nations.
Chile's senior APEC official Ricardo A. Lagos said the ministerial statement on the WTO talks was expected to stress on market access and export subsidies and reflect "hopefully" an agreement on the so-called Singapore issues.
The APEC ministers would stress reduction of agriculture subsidies and call for a target date for doing that, meeting sources said.
They may also call for some form of modality for opening up the non-agriculture sector and urge WTO members, who have yet to make their offers on liberalization of the services sector, to have them ready by July, the sources said.
A key subject of the ministerial talks on Friday was the Singapore issues, fleshed out at a WTO meeting on the Southeast Asian island in 1996.
The issues are trade facilitation, cross border investment and competition, and transparency in government procurement.
The United States, European Union and Japan have been pushing for all four issues to be included in the Doha Round, much to the chagrin of developing countries, but of late have agreed to focus only on trade facilitation -- a process to make doing business easier and less costly.
The APEC ministers are expected to agree in their joint statement that trade facilitation should be included as an "item for negotiation in Geneva as part of a single undertaking."
WTO chief Supachai Panitchpakdi, who briefed APEC ministers on the work being done at the global trade watchdog's headquarters in Geneva, said after talks with the ministers that he was optimistic APEC would set the ball rolling in Geneva.
"If they send a strong signal on their commitment on that particular issue (trade facilitation) to be taken up, I think that would help to galvanize further work in Geneva, Supachai told AFP.
"Because, that is our working hypothesis anyway."
Supachai said WTO was itself crafting a draft statement to be finalized by the end of July on a package of trade liberalization measures.
It "hopefully will be a framework agreement for key market access areas of agriculture and non-agriculture," he said.
The Cancun talks collapsed after developing and industrialized states disagreed over cross border investment and competition. The two sides also split over richer states' farming subsidies, and tariffs imposed on agriculture imports by developing economies.