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.