Doubts over APEC deadlines
Updated
Asia Pacific leaders are raising a toast to 20 years of APEC the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation forum - though the celebrations in Singapore come amid doubts APEC can meet its own deadlines on opening up trade and business in the region.
Detractors have long said APEC is more talk than substance, though it continues to attract not only all the major regional leaders and their top ministers, but business as well, and supporters say APEC has helped make the region far more liberal than it was when it began on the lawns of a plush hotel in Canberra in 1989. Two decades on, there's not only reflection on the past, but also some big new challenges.
Presenter: Sen Lam
Speaker: Linda Mottram, Radio Australia's Canberra Correspondent
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MOTTRAM: Certainly, it has edurance on its side. Twenty years is not a bad batting average to use a cricketing analogy and those meetings have regularly been attended annually by all of the relevant leaders and ministers along the way, and of course it is an ongoing process. APEC has a very long list of meetings that go on all year between officials, business and of course then these main set piece annual events with the leaders and foreign ministers and trade ministers, so it is enduring.
It has of course 20 years on the advantage of looking back on a period when trade was opening up and liberalising anyway, so the global agenda, if you like played to the APEC agenda. The question for detractors is whether APEC played much of a role in that. It has a very loose structure and while some people say that that's been its strength, that that makes it much easier to come to the forum and be willing to discuss issues and set agendas. Others say that is also its weakness. So it's still evolving in many ways, because it faces a lot of new issues for the future.
LAM: So what has the group achieved, what's likely trade headline if you like from the meetings in Singapore?
MOTTRAM: Well, the trade headlines from the meetings in Singapore could include one that is not all that favourable. APEC has not, or it certainly does not look to be on track, to achieve what are called the Bogor goals, which they adopted in 1994 in Indonesia, which called for industrialised members to achieve free trade and investment targets by 2010, just next year. Now it is pretty much acknowledged widely that that's just not quite there, in fact substantially not there, notwithstanding the substantial trade advantages that have evolved over recent years. So it may actually not meet one of its own goals.
On the other hand, the big headline will be that the free trade agenda is still our agenda, we are pushing forward and they are likely in that vein to push very much for the dreaded drawn out troubled Doha project, the global trade liberalisation talks to push on next year.
LAM: Looking ahead though, what's the view on APEC's future, because it must be feeling the impact of the discussion about how to accommodate a rising China and the future role of the US in the region?
MOTTRAM: Indeed, that's exactly, that is the big picture issue for APEC and there is a lot of academic and sort of officials discussion about what its structure ought to be and some quite detailed thinking out there about how to reshape APEC. Remember this also comes in the context of issues such as Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's suggestion of a restructured regional architecture, Japan is also thinking along those lines. There is a push on the US to try to do more to show that it is in the trade liberalisation mould and not in the protectionist mould, that President Obama indicated during his election campaign. So there is a lot on that agenda and of course that over writes the issue of accommodating China and China and the US along side each other. So APEC is in for something of a shake up one would imagine and that is very much under discussion amongst people who watch this institution.
