More countries join the rush to sign on for free trade talks with ASEAN
More countries join the rush to sign on for free trade talks with ASEAN
Agencies, Vientiane
Four Pacific Rim economies from Australia to Japan joined the rush to court Southeast Asia, agreeing on Tuesday to launch free trade talks with the region's leaders hours after they clinched a momentous market-opening deal with booming China.
The four nations -- also including South Korea and New Zealand -- signed accords with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) at their summit in Laos to launch free trade talks early next year, aiming for trade pacts within two years.
ASEAN and Japanese officials said tariff-cutting talks on their trade zone would start in April and be wrapped up in two years.
"We were very, very stimulated by China's initiative," a Japanese official told reporters at the summit in the sleepy Laos capital. "We want to make it speedy, not because of China, but because this sort of negotiation needs impetus."
ASEAN's free trade deal with China is due to be phased in from 2010, and its agreement with Japan, who sent Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to Vientiane, by 2012.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, another guest at the annual jamboree of ASEAN, also made plans to get its own regional trade zone done and dusted by 2016.
"India is a country which has been growing at 6 to 7 percent for the last several years and this is a fact which is of interest to ASEAN countries," said Indian foreign ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna.
Amid a flurry of trade deals all designed to keep pace with China's growing economic and political clout, South Korea, the last one of the three North Asian guests at the summit, also pressed for a piece of the action.
Seoul, which edged closer to a mini-free trade pact with Singapore on Monday, said it would open talks on reducing trade levies with its southern neighbors in early 2005.
Not to be outdone by Japan, negotiations with South Korea will also take only two years, a summit statement said.
In a free trade frenzy sparked by China's moves two years ago, the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand also put in their first appearances at an ASEAN summit with overtures for their rendition of a free trade zone.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard stressed that his country bore no ill will toward Southeast Asian nations despite his refusal to heed ASEAN's calls to join its nonaggression treaty, which he has dismissed as a relic of the Cold War.
"We have no hostile intentions towards anybody in the region," Howard said.
Some countries in Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia, have been wary of Howard because of his comments in 2002 that he reserves the right to launch pre-emptive attacks in countries if terrorists there threaten his citizens.
But the retirement last year of former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who had often-icy relations with Howard, brought an improvement in Australia's ties with Kuala Lumpur, and its first ever invitation to an ASEAN summit.
Mahathir's successor Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said Australia will likely be invited again for next year's summit in Malaysia.
Tuesday's accords came a day after ASEAN and China signed a pact aimed at phasing in the world's largest free trade area by decade's end -- a sprawling market of nearly 2 billion people.
The Southeast Asian group's secretary-general, Ong Keng Yong, said it would expand trade between the regions from about US$100 billion this year to as much as $140 billion by 2010.
The agreement not only opens markets, but eases fears that China would be a "strategic bully" in the region, said Denny Roy of the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii.
"China has also tried to sell Southeast Asia on the idea that China's economic development is more of an opportunity than a threat to the region," Roy said. "The prevailing view seems to be that China is so far living up to its claim that it will not be a strategic bully as it grows more powerful."
The pact aims to bring tariffs below 5 percent in most of the 11 countries by 2010 -- giving an extra two years for prized products such as cars, and granting an extra five years for poorest ASEAN members Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam to come on line.
The agreements with China and India reflect desires by Southeast Asia to latch onto economies that are siphoning foreign investment from the region.