RCEP talks likely to be concluded before year-end: Asean chief

Meetings of ministers and senior officials over the past months since Asean leaders gave the go-ahead for talks during the 2018 summit in Singapore last November have made significant progress, Asean Secretary-General Lim Jock Hoi said on Monday.

 

Since elections in a host of member countries including Thailand, Indonesia and India were over and political difficulties have been resolved, the respective negotiators have the full mandate to go ahead with the trade discussions, he said.

 

The global situation, especially the trade spat between the United States and China, have pushed RCEP nations to seek a quick conclusion to negotiations so the whole bloc can reach an agreement. 

 

“We are in the seventh year so we don’t want to go beyond that,” Lim told journalists from the group at the Asean Media Forum at a Bangkok hotel. Lim was in Thailand this week for the Asean foreign ministers’ meeting, which will end on Saturday. He met with senior regional journalists and editors on the sidelines.

 

Launched in 2012 by the 10-member Asean grouping and its partners in the Asia and the Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, South Korea and India, negotiations have been completed on only seven of 20 chapters and are struggling to pass one of the most difficult parts on market access.

 

The key obstacle lies in the fact that some non-Asean members lack free-trade agreements among themselves. Therefore, they need to resolve thorny issues including market access, he said.

 

It’s widely known that India is among the non-Asean bloc which has no free-trade agreement with other RCEP members and the government is under pressure to protect its domestic industries.

 

Representatives of Indonesia as the leading country and Thailand as Asean chair as well as Secretary Lim flew to India recently for talks to help ease the problems.
“We have to understand India’s problems, because they have to deal with domestic pressure,” Lim said. “But it’s not just India. We have sixteen other economies with different levels of development and in various stages of liberalisation, so it is not easy to put them in one basket. We need to balance the interests of each country, that’s the role of Asean,” Lim said.

 

A round of meetings from now including one of senior officials in Beijing this month and Asean Economic Ministers in September are expected to make major progress in negotiations in time for the final summit in November, he said.

 

The previous meeting in Melbourne resolved some issues, such as telecommunications, information technology and financial services. “The negotiations on market access are still going on and they will not end until everyone is satisfied,” Lim added.