'Resist pressure on non-trade issues'

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia asked fellow members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) yesterday to resist the West's pressure to link environmental and human rights issues with international trade talks.

The U.S. and western Europe have planned to discuss the "non- trade" issues at the forthcoming World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Singapore, scheduled for December.

When opening the two-day ASEAN Ministerial Meeting, Indonesia's President Soeharto called on the seven ASEAN member countries to consolidate their common position against the West's insistence.

Soeharto stressed that the WTO meeting should not deviate from world trade, as agreed upon at the Uruguay Round meeting in Marrakesh in April 1994.

"We must express concern over the efforts of some developed countries to sidetrack the deliberations ... so that the focus will be on matters extraneous to trade," he noted.

Such efforts will not only denigrate the developing countries, but also ultimately debilitate the WTO itself, Soeharto said.

ASEAN member countries see inclusion of human rights and environmental issues in world trade talks as motivated by the developed countries' protectionist policy and harmful to developing countries exports.

The establishment of WTO in December last year as the embodiment of the results of the Uruguay Round has raised the hope that the world community would be able to rely on a multilateral instrument that can regulate the global trading system in a transparent, equitable and balanced fashion.

"But just because the WTO has been launched does not mean that the inequities and imbalances of the world trade regime will be automatically redressed," Soeharto noted.

The rules and regulations of the WTO have to be complied with and its member countries must summon the political will to adhere to its discipline, he added.

The President noted widening disparities and "unacceptable inequities" that continue to undermine relations between developing and industrialized countries while a large part of humanity languishes in abject poverty.

Global population pressures and "reckless consumption patterns" in developed countries continue to wreak havoc on the environment, he said.

"These problems are global and systematic in nature and therefore cannot be solved by any one nation or groups of nations, no matter how powerful they are," he said.

Soeharto underlined the importance of stability in the Asia Pacific rim to allow dialogs and cooperation in development.

Development is possible only if stability is prevalent so that growth is possible. The economy grows, so there is more to be shared and the fruits of development are shared equally, he added. (pan)