Building blocks laid for trade deal
BusinessDay 10/12/2010
Building blocks laid for trade deal
ANDREA FOX
It was a week of "tedious work", in the words of a chief negotiator, but as the fourth round of negotiations for the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership free trade agreement winds up in Auckland today New Zealand is pleased at having pushed progress along.
What was achieved, and why exactly a TPP would be good for New Zealand, remains a mystery – strictly controlled daily media briefings with Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry chief negotiator Mark Sinclair were short and impenetrable.
But the impression given is that further building blocks were laid for a free trade agreement between New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Singapore, Chile, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam and Peru.
The proposed Asia-Pacific region trade deal would piggyback on an existing trade agreement between New Zealand, Chile, Singapore and Brunei (P4).
Mr Sinclair says the 400 negotiators from the nine countries will end the week a long way from the critical stages of negotiating market access, sector or product exclusions, but New Zealand’s 30 negotiators and working group chairs achieved what they set out to do.
"The heart of an FTA [free trade agreement] is to get text developed – the words on paper – for legal commitments that constitute an FTA because they give certainty to traders and governments on their obligations.
"We wanted to move as far forward as we could on these chapters. We are well aware we are not at the point of the tough areas like market access or policy issues, but the natural order in putting these things together is to flesh out, identify common grounds."
It’s tedious work, Mr Sinclair says, because you have to capture the positions of all nine countries, and grind away at removing qualifications they want to put in.
"This is the meat and drink of these negotiations so you can get to the stage some time next year where you can say, `these are the 12 or so really tough policy issues we need to address’."
Five more rounds of negotiations are to be held.
Mr Sinclair would not detail progress on the wide range of negotiation areas, from agriculture and government procurement to competition policy, investment, environment and e-commerce privacy, but said there was "a high level of satisfaction" with overall progress.
A feature this week has been discussion on what the ministry calls "horizontal issues", which focused on what a TPP could do to support small and medium enterprises trading in the nine markets by creating efficient supply chains and creating consistent and compatible regulations for ease of trade.
Anti-globalisation protesters kicked off the week saying a TPP was "a bill of rights for trans-national corporations to plunder our economy".
