APEC, Doha talks continue

APEC, Doha talks continue

Sydney (dpa) - Trade ministers from the Asia-Pacific met in Australia Thursday to try to stave off a collapse in the latest round of talks to liberalize world trade.
Representatives of the 21 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies gathered in the far northern city of Cairns to salvage something from the Doha Round of the 150-member World Trade Organization (WTO) talks.
"If we are able to reach a degree of consensus, well, that can provide some leadership," Australian Trade Minister Warren Truss said in comments that reflected pessimism that APEC could succeed where other international organizations had failed. "The G4 and the G6 and similar processes based around small negotiating groups have not succeeded."
The European Union, the United States, Brazil and India are the Group of Four (G4) nations. They met in Potsdam, Germany, last month to breathe new life into the 6-year-old Doha Round, but delegates gave up after India and Brazil walked out of the meeting.
Australia is the current host of APEC, the region's most important intergovernmental grouping, which also includes 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.
US Trade Representative Susan Schwab said on her arrival in Cairns that APEC had the capacity to give momentum to the Doha Round - as it did in the 1990s during the Uruguay Round. She also said that an APEC free trade agreement could become a building block for a global trade pact.
"So much of our trade is in the Asia-Pacific region, and it would make an incredible amount of sense to see an Asia-Pacific-wide trade agreement," she told reporters.
APEC members account for about half of world trade. Schwab warned against trying for a Doha Round deal that skirted around the most difficult issues of agricultural and manufacturing protection.
"We couldn't sell that at home," she said.