APEC trade ministers vow to press on with Doha

Japan's Trade Minister Masayuki Naoshima speaks to media at the 7th WTO ministerial meeting in Geneva December 1, 2009.

SAPPORO, Japan (Reuters) - Trade ministers of the Asia-Pacific region agreed on Sunday to press on with stalled Doha talks on global trade and planned to relay the political momentum for this to a Group of 20 meeting later this month.

The ministers of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum also agreed to craft by November a plan outlining possible ways to reach a regional free trade area, although bringing together the economically diverse members will likely face hurdles.

"As APEC, we were able to send a clear message to the next G20 on our political will to speed up the (Doha) negotiations," Japanese trade minister Masayuki Naoshima told a news conference after a two-day meeting in northern Japan.

The Doha round of world trade talks was launched in 2001 to correct some of the imbalances in the global trading system.

Under a current draft deal, rich countries would lift barriers to their food markets and cut trade-distorting farm subsidies while developing countries, excluding the poorest, would open their markets to more products and services.

But agreement on an overall package has proved elusive, with the United States arguing that big emerging economies such as Brazil, China and India should do more to facilitate a deal.

While the APEC ministers shared a resolve to conclude the Doha round swiftly, the United States also called for more substantive negotiations.

"There is no shortcut at the end of the day for the actual act of sitting down across the table from each other and having a negotiation," Michael Punke, the U.S. ambassador to the World Trade Organisation, told Reuters on Saturday, adding that more effort from China had yet to be seen.

As the Doha talks struggle, regional trade deals are gaining impetus. APEC is seeking to achieve its own trade area, called Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP).

But reaching consensus among the APEC members, which include relatively poor countries, emerging markets and rich economies with different ideas about the pace and extent of open trade and investment, will not be easy.

Some developing countries including China prioritise free trade deals based on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), while eight members of APEC including the United States are seeking their own binding pact.

U.S. Deputy Trade Representative Demetrios Marantis said that the pact, called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), and the APEC goals complement each other.

"Many of the initiatives we try to do in APEC in a non-binding way, we can take TPP and bind those amongst the current eight members," Marantis told Reuters ahead of this month's TPP talks, set to be held in San Francisco.

WTO head Pascal Lamy said on Saturday that he was monitoring regional trade negotiations to make sure they did not sap energy from the main Doha round of world trade talks.

On a sticky commerce issue regarding the status of Japan's mammoth postal, banking and insurance conglomerate, Marantis said that the United States did not rule out taking it to the WTO.

The United States and the European Union say Japan Post, with assets of 300 trillion yen ($3.3 trillion), receives special treatment and hurts private-sector competitors.

"I think we are looking at all of our options. We are trying to work cooperatively with the Japanese government to achieve resolution of these concerns and if that's not possible, we'll have to explore a variety of options before us," he said.

APEC economies account for 40 percent of the global population, more than half of global gross domestic product and nearly half of world trade. The leaders will meet in Japan in November.

It groups Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, the United States and Vietnam. (Editing by Sugita Katyal)