WTO talks won't stop Asian free trade drive
WTO talks won't stop Asian free trade drive
Alan Wheatley, Reuters, Tokyo
Fast-track trade negotiating authority for U.S. President George W. Bush will give a much-needed boost to the Doha round of global market-opening talks, but is unlikely to slow a separate drive for closer trade ties across Asia, officials said on Monday.
Bush looks set to win the authority to negotiate new trade agreements without the risk of amendments by Congress -- restoring a power that lapsed in 1994 -- after the House of Representatives approved a "trade promotion authority" bill late on Friday following an 18-month campaign by the White House.
The Senate, which backed similar legislation earlier this year, is expected to pass the bill this week and send it to Bush to sign into law.
Coupled with U.S. proposals published last week to tear down global barriers to farm trade, fast-track authority is a fillip for the market-opening talks that ministers from the 144-member World Trade Organization launched last November in Doha in the hope of forging agreement by the end of 2004.
"It's good news. Our assessment is that it enables the U.S. to adopt more of a leadership role in the WTO and, specifically, APEC," said George Troup, a senior New Zealand trade official with responsibility for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.
"The U.S. does have much greater authority and clout when people know it's in a position to deal," Troup added.
With the Doha round no longer looking like a lost cause, regional officials said plans were likely to be revived for a "mini-ministerial" meeting in Asia in November to take stock of progress.
Most Asia-Pacific countries, which rely heavily on trade, were so frustrated by the delays in following up the 1986-93 Uruguay Round of market-opening measures that they threw themselves into exploring bilateral agreements with like-minded free traders.
"Some of the bilateral agreements going round were embarked on because the U.S. wasn't in a position to play," Troup said. "And the devil makes work for idle trade negotiators."
Singapore has been in the vanguard. It has signed free trade agreements (FTAs) with Japan and New Zealand and is negotiating with Australia and the United States.
Japan is talking to Mexico and to South Korea, which in turn is eying a deal with Chile.
More ambitiously, China has begun exploratory FTA talks with the 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), prompting Japan to declare a similar long-term goal.
Some trade academics fear that the rash of bilateral and regional FTAs will be stumbling blocks, not building blocks, to more-open multilateral trade by diverting trade away from countries that are left out.
Nevertheless, officials said a new lease of life for the Doha round was unlikely to reverse this trend.
Nobuo Tanaka, a senior official in Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Economy, said the pursuit of bilateral and regional market-opening agreements was part of what he called a multi-layered approach to trade liberalization.
"This kind of Asian regional integration will be a driving force for a new WTO round," said Tanaka, who is director-general of the multilateral trade system department in METI's Trade Policy Bureau.
A regional policy adviser said China and Japan were determined to keep pressing for FTAs with ASEAN as part of their competition for leadership in the region.
"I think Japan and China have got their own strategic political games they're playing through trade," said the official, who declined to be identified. "There are non-economic benefits that they want to get out of these agreements quite apart from trade liberalization."
At the same time, other Asian governments saw the need for closer regional integration because of a fear of being excluded from two huge blocs in the making -- an expanded European Union and Bush's proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas.
"Those big trends are already in place and could well be enough to lead eventually to an East Asian free trade area," the policy planner said.