Osaka summit seen crucial to Manila

Osaka summit seen crucial to Manila

By Maria Teresa Villanueva-Cerojano

MANILA (Kyodo): As host of the 1996 leaders meeting of the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, the Philippines
is pinning its hopes on a successful APEC summit in Osaka in
November.

The Osaka dialogues will determine the issues the Philippines
will take care of as chairman next year, when the framework for
liberalization called the Action Agenda will be fleshed out.

And as Philippine officials point out, a successful summit
this year will ensure smooth sailing when Manila takes the helm
of the forum in 1996.

President Fidel Ramos and his delegation, therefore, will go
to Osaka on their tiptoes, mindful of not ruffling any feathers
that might threaten the success of the 1996 summit.

A senior official also said that while the Philippines has its
own sensitivities, "we do not articulate it because we will be
chairman next year."

Ramos says he is taking a middle-of-the-road stance in Osaka,
where the question of exempting or excluding sensitive areas like
agricultural products from full liberalization is expected to
divide the forum's 18 member economies.

While countries like the United States and Australia are
demanding there be no exemptions, some members, particularly
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China, are calling for special
treatment for farm areas in the Action Agenda -- a set of trade
and investment liberalization guidelines to be implemented in the
region by 2020.

"The Philippines would want APEC to succeed in 1995 and 1996,"
Ramos told Kyodo News Service in an interview. "If we do not
succeed and stay together in 1995 this will be very difficult for
us in 1996."

"Perhaps we should look at the middle," he said, adding that
"it's not just us who are saying this, the other developing
countries would want a more moderate kind of transitioning to
take place."

Ramos said the Philippines would be prepared to suggest some
middle courses for the Action Agenda which could suffice as
short-term solutions.

The Action Agenda and so-called down payments to be laid down
in Osaka are expected to have an impact on the Philippines, which
aspires to be the region's next tiger economy by the turn of the
century after almost three decades of being "the sick man of
Asia."

The country's present trade and investments are already
heavily tied to the Asia-Pacific economies.

Trade Secretary Rizalino Navarro says 77 percent of the
country's total trade of US$34.8 billion in 1994 was with APEC
members.

"It is a much bigger market for exports than imports and more
importantly, gave the Philippines a $5.2 billion favorable
balance of trade" in 1994, Navarro told a forum of foreign
business leaders recently.

He also said APEC accounted for 70 percent of the foreign
investment inflow to the Philippines last year -- one-third of
which came from the U.S. while the rest came from Hong Kong,
Taiwan, Japan and other members of the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Besides the bigger market that APEC provides, Foreign
Undersecretary Federico Macaranas said the Philippines' interests
in APEC are centered on human resources development and the
development of small and medium enterprises.

As a major labor exporting country where half of the
population lives in poverty, the Philippines sees APEC as a
vehicle to uplift and empower its poor, said Macaranas, who heads
the Philippine delegation to APEC senior officials meetings.

Julius Caesar Parrenas, director of the University of Asia and
the Pacific's Institute for International and Strategic Studies,
says APEC is more crucial to the Philippines in the long term,
since the forum is beginning to move toward liberalization in the
next decade.

"For the medium term, the impact on the Philippines is not
much, but maybe there will be some benefits if there is a
decision to hasten the Uruguay Round commitments," he told Kyodo,
explaining that this will give the Philippines better market
access to certain countries.

Within the next five to six years, however, APEC will pave the
way for a fully open market at a time when the Philippines would
be in full gear to compete with the rest of its neighbors,
Parrenas said.

Macaranas, meanwhile, is upbeat on the prospects for the
Philippines in Osaka.

"In Osaka, when the commitments are made, we should get
something good," he said.

"I think because of the things we have heard in the meetings,
the developments are really good," he said, noting that "there
are many countries already liberalizing faster than we had
expected."