Beijing has not responded to Taiwan's offer to talk on the sidelines of the WTO Ministerial Conference in Cancun, Mexico, and with only two days left in the meeting, chances are slim that anything will change, a Taiwanese delegate said Friday.
The official said that repre-sentatives at the WTO meeting had tried to contact their Chinese counterparts via a third party but to no avail.
Huang Chih-peng (黃志鵬), director-general of the Foreign Trade Bureau and spokesman for the Taiwan delegation at the conference, said he didn't know why Beijing had not responded to Taiwan's offer; however, the door is always open for negotiations on economic issues, he added.
Meanwhile, US deputy trade representative Josette Sheeran Shiner said on Friday that the US would not consider signing a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Taiwan due to Taiwan's poor performance in protecting intellectual property rights (IPR), as well as mishandling in allocating tariff-quotas for rice imports.
Shiner made the statement to respond to Minister of Economic Affairs Lin Yi-fu (
To defend the nation's actions in protecting IPR, Huang told Shiner that Taiwan passed a stricter version of Copyright Law in June, which will improve the nation's IPR protection efforts.
In addition, referring to the pivotal agricultural negotiations, Shiner said that Taiwan's stance differed from the joint US-EU proposal, and, therefore, she hoped that Taiwan would proceed cautiously.
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