SANGIAGO (AFP) - Asia-Pacific powers appeared split on a radical proposal for the creation of a region-wide free trade pact.
Business chiefs have called for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum leaders, who hold a summit here this weekend, to consider launching a Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP).
A region-wide free trade deal, they argue, could inject life into APEC's flagging free-trade agenda.
The plan is likely to be discussed by the 21 APEC trade ministers, who, along with foreign ministers, are meeting in the Chilean capital Santiago on Wednesday and Thursday to do the groundwork for the leaders' "retreat."
APEC is already working on a decade-old set of lofty but non-binding promises, made in Bogor, Indonesia, to demolish barriers to trade and investment by 2010 in its developed economies and by 2020 in developing economies.
But "it appears increasingly unlikely that the 2010 deadline set for developed economies to achieve the Bogor goals of free and open trade and investment will be met," the APEC Business Advisory Council said in a report to leaders.
"This is a major concern to ABAC since it goes to the heart of APEC's credibility as a regional economic cooperation forum."
The pressed leaders to agree to set up a task force to study the feasibility of a concrete free-trade agreement covering the entire region. That task force would deliver a report to next year's APEC summit.
APEC members seemed divided on even the idea of a reciprocal, discriminatory free-trade agreement, which would break with one of APEC's steadfast principles that nothing agreed is binding.
Business chiefs had briefed members of APEC's core trade panel, the Committee on Trade and Investment (CTI), on the free-trade plan, CTI chairman Alan Bowman told a news conference here Wednesday.
"Those committee members who responded to the presentation expressed positions that covered a full spectrum of potential responses," Bowman said. "I cannot say that the CTI had one view on this proposal."
A preliminary assessment by Pacific Economic Cooperation Council trade forum official Robert Scollay stressed that a binding region-wide free-trade agreement would be a major change for APEC.
"It would ... represent a fundamental and decisive departure," he said in a report.
"In order to support the FTAAP concept APEC members would need to be satisfied that this change of direction is justified and desirable," Scollay said.
Scollay's paper had to be issued under his own name, however, because of disagreements even among members of the trade forum, some of whom vehemently opposed the proposed trade deal.
Taiwan said it backed the scheme.
"Chinese Taipei has expressed our view of approval on the issue of the FTAAP," Huang Chih-Peng, director of the Board of Foreign Trade, said at a news conference here Tuesday, according to an official translation of his remarks.
He recognized that some APEC members had reservations, noting that APEC economies differed hugely.
But "if we want to show there is a positive and optimist way, we have to introduce a new idea," the Taipei official said. "We have recommended that all APEC members can endorse FTAAP."
APEC host Chile, which relies heavily on exports, is also calling on APEC members to grapple with an increasingly complex web of one-on-one and regional trade agreements by making them more transparent for fellow members.
APEC comprises Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam.
11/17/2004 - 18:32 GMT - AFP