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."