Negotiators have made “a tonne of progress” on a planned giant Pacific free-trade pact over the past year, but the tough phase has only just begun, a top US trade official said Friday.
US Deputy Trade Representative Demetrios Marantis said a “vast amount” of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) had been agreed upon by the nine countries involved.
“We’ve made a tonne of progress over the past year and we’ve reached a point now where we have many challenging issues that we have to address,” Marantis told AFP at an Asia Pacific meeting in the Far East Russian city of Vladivostok.
The nine countries currently involved in the talks are Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam.
Marantis said Canada and Mexico would also formally join the talks in October.
All nations are members of the 21-economy APEC forum, whose leaders are due to hold an annual summit in Vladivostok this weekend.
Marantis said trade ministers from the nine countries involved in the TPP met on Thursday in Vladivostok on the sidelines of pre-summit APEC events, and later held discussions with their counterparts from Canada and Mexico.
Ministers are not the ones negotiating, but they give instructions to their negotiators. The 14th round of talks began in the United States this week and run until September 15.
The TPP began as an obscure grouping of Singapore, Brunei, New Zealand and Chile.
But it gained momentum when the United States joined in 2008, with President Barack Obama since focusing on the potential pact as a tool to advance American economic interests in the Asia Pacific.
Obama’s administration has touted the TPP as a pathway toward achieving a long-desired free trade area of the Asia Pacific that would span both sides of the Pacific Rim, from Chile to China via the United States.
But analysts have said China, which is an APEC member, is reluctant to join the TPP, preferring bilateral and other regional free trade pacts in which it has more influence.
Japan has expressed an interest but faces intense domestic opposition to joining the TPP, particularly from rice farmers. Thousands of farmers staged a rally in Tokyo in April to voice their alarm about the pact.
The TPP could create the biggest free trade area in the world, bigger than the European Union’s, covering more than 650 million people.
Its backers say the TPP would create the highest standards of any free trade pact. However its critics say the negotiations are being held in secretive fashion, with non-government stakeholders being unable to give input.
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, speaking at a business forum in Vladivostok on Friday, said a high-quality trade pact was crucial to economic growth in the region.
“In TPP we are trying to establish a club with high standards and stringent dress codes. All governments involved will have to take some tough decisions if we are to get there,” he said.
Obama has called for the negotiations to be finalised by the end of this year, however there are few expectations that will occur.
When asked about meeting the 2012 deadline, Marantis said only that negotiators were gaining momentum and that they were working to achieve a pact as quickly as possible.
'Tonne of progress' in trans-Pacific pact: US
