Japan hopes S'pore free-trade pact will boost regional ties
Japan hopes S'pore free-trade pact will boost regional ties
SINGAPORE (AP): Japan hopes that a free-trade pact in the
works with Singapore will improve its ties with other Southeast
Asian countries and Australia, Japan's chief negotiator in the
talks said Friday.
"If we have a closer relationship with Singapore, hopefully,
this will bring Japan closer to other ASEAN countries and
Australia," Kazuo Asakai told The Associated Press in an
interview.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is a political and
economic alliance of 10 nations: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia,
Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, also known as Burma, the Philippines,
Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Japan already has good relationships with Southeast Asia and
Australia, but closer ties with Singapore, a stable country with
close ties throughout the region, could be helpful, Asakai said.
If the Singapore pact, which would be Japan's first bilateral
free-trade agreement, is successful, "We would be more open to
considering similar agreements with other countries," Asakai
added.
Japan has made tentative, "informal" studies of the
possibility of forming free-trade pacts with Mexico and South
Korea.
"Singapore was probably more interested in this than Mexico or
other countries," said Asakai, who is Japan's ambassador for
international economic affairs and global environmental affairs.
Asakai was in Singapore for a two-day round of talks Wednesday
and Thursday on a pact that would include goods, services,
investment, and other aspects of trade such as speeding up
customs procedures.
Negotiators from both sides said Thursday that they hope to
complete a deal this year.
Asakai said Friday, however, that he came from the talks
feeling that "the sheer volume of work" needed in some areas was
more than he expected.
"The discussions were not all that ripe to go into the
concrete details," he said. "There's an awful lot of work that we
have to do."
Singapore signed a free-trade agreement with New Zealand last
year and is negotiating similar deals with the United States,
Mexico and other countries.
Although Singapore is a small city-state with no natural
resources, some analysts are eager to see whether agriculture -
usually a sensitive issue in free-trade talks - makes it into any
deal.
Japan tightly controls its agriculture sector and bans imports
of many related products. American farmers have often complained
about Tokyo's closed markets, though the United States is the
world's top exporter of agricultural products to Japan.
If agriculture is omitted from the deal with Singapore, it
could set a precedent.
"We haven't gotten to the stage where we are talking
specifically about agriculture," Asakai said of the Singapore
talks.
Japan and Singapore are to hold senior-level talks on the pact
again in April and July, with lower-level meetings in between.