SUNS4508 Wednesday 15 September 1999

Trade: APEC Summit ends with a whimper



Canberra, Sep 13 (IPS/Bob Burton) -- Ending a summit in New Zealand overshadowed by the East Timor crisis, Asia-Pacific leaders and ministers managed little more than handing the stalemate over trade liberalisation to the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The leaders of the 21 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), closing their meeting in Auckland, New Zealand Monday, also supported a public relations campaign to shore up APEC's declining political support base.
The APEC Economic Leaders Declaration as a "vacuous document that proves that APEC is on the long road to nowhere," Jane Kelsey, professor of law at Auckland University, said after the summit's end.

The Leaders Declaration, she says, "largely proves that APEC isn't going anywhere."

"Restatements of commitments to meeting trade liberalisation goals by 2010 for developed countries and 2020 for developing countries mean little. And the statement of principles is so heavily qualified with 'voluntary' and 'non-binding' that it means little," Kelsey argues.

One of the few specific commitments APEC leaders made was to support "the abolition of agricultural export subsidies and unjustifiable export prohibitions and restrictions" as an important objective in discussions initiated by the at its ministerial meeting in Seattle in November.

To entice developing countries into supporting this, the APEC leaders' declaration restated general commitments to increased development of rural infrastructure and technology transfer for agriculture.

"The linking of technology transfer to ending agricultural subsidies actually means this is the approach that will be adopted in Seattle," said Nicola Bullard, deputy director of the Bangkok-based think tank Focus on the Global South.

"It is an approach I would be very sceptical about as the major problem is that developing countries have very few bargaining chips," she explained.

"The inequalities of bargaining power are embedded in APEC negotiations. Even though on paper you might have open negotiations, the very inequalities means some are more equal than others," Bullard added.
Agri-business lobbying for support for genetically modified food also won endorsement from the trade ministers -- a move that is certain to be met with opposition by environmental activists around the region.

The ministers' communique endorsed the importance of "transparent and science-based approaches to the introduction and use of biotechnology products." US genetic engineering companies are fearful of the European Union placing bans on imports of genetically engineered products.

"Technical cooperation" and "capacity building" in biotechnology emphasised that such activity "should take into account WTO rules, as well as consumers' interest in food safety, environmental quality, and facilitate the realisation of the potential benefits of this technology."

This brings APEC into dangerous ground, critics say. Bullard said that as it is, "the big agricultural corporations, such as Monsanto are very, very keen to get genetically modified organisms (GMO's) within the trade liberalisation regime."

GMOs' inclusion within trade liberalisation, she warned, would enable current bans implemented by countries or the European Union to be circumvented.

While some said this year's APEC summit has done little to resolve the debate over the usefulness of the 10-year-old forum, others were a bit more optimistic about the forum that groups countries from North and South America, to East Asia down to the Pacific.

Darby Higgs, deputy director of the Melbourne-based Asia-Pacific Study Centre, notes at least APEC officials this time "haven't got stuck on the stuff they got stuck on last year, which is good".

Last year, western nations trying to push for accelerated liberalisation in certain sectors faced strong opposition from Japan, loathe to open up too quickly sensitive domestic sectors like forestry.

Higgs says this year's summit will be known not for trade discussions, but East Timor, though APEC is mainly an economic forum.

"The leaders' declaration often doesn't say very much, but the fact is they have been talking a lot about Timor. My overall impression is that APEC was able to demonstrate the significance of the political leaders meeting over Timor and has had a chance to push issues other than trade," he said.

"APEC has got away from that trade-based agenda to the other aspects of economic cooperation and trade facilitation and all those less sexy ideas," Higgs observed.

Some of the few specific technical co-operation commitments dwelt on fostering electronic commerce and preparing for the millennium or Y2K bug.

Bullard is more ambivalent about APEC's future, believing it has been dominated in past years by the US when it realised it could serve its purposes.

Thus "APEC will die when the US wants it to. It was useful in its very early inception because it was a way of pushing the European Union (EU) to agree to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade," Bullard said.

But the spotlight on APEC -- once touted as the vanguard of a massive free trade area linking North America to Oceania -- may change with binding negotiations focusing on the WTO.

"It seems like the big trading powers, the G-7, are getting pretty much everything they want out of the WTO so they don't need to use other forums such as APEC on other trade issues," she explained. "I see APEC as a testing ground for issues that are not being picked up with enough speed for the interested parties."

For business people, APEC leaves more to be desired and member countries acknowledged the frustration of the business community at the slowing speed of trade liberalisation.
However, the concerns of other groups on the impacts of trade liberalisation -- from unions to non-government organisations -- drew only support for a public relations programme aimed at persuading the member national populations of the "benefits" of APEC and trade liberalisation.

APEC members needed to "expand their efforts to build community understanding of APEC's goals", Asia-Pacific trade ministers stated.

Fearing that the costs of trade liberalisation were dominating public debate in many countries, they stressed that the public relations campaign should emphasise the "benefits of a more open and integrated regional economy."

They said the messages need "to be realistic, free of jargon and relevant to people's individual interests."