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Thaksin touts free trade at APEC

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra gives a speech at a two-day APEC meeting of trade ministers in the northeastern town of Khon Kaen, 500km from Bangkok, yesterday. PHOTO: REUTERS

Trade should be fair and free, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra told APEC trade ministers yesterday, before expressing confidence the economic impact of SARS would be over in the next three months. The 21-member APEC forum was working on its position for the upcoming WTO Ministerial Conference in Mexico in Septem-ber, and it was clear agricultural tariffs were an issue.

Thaksin opened the two-day meeting in northeast Thailand by calling on the group, which accounts for over 46 percent of total world exports, to use trade to reduce income inequality.

"APEC should promote not only free trade, but fair trade. Especially in agricultural trade, attempts should be made to reduce the prices to consumers and eliminate farmers' poverty," Thaksin said.

Thai Commerce Minister Adisai Bodharamik said the APEC forum would also discuss "re-establishing business confidence after many economies have been adversely affected by the SARS and terrorist incidents."

Thaksin said the fear of terror attacks were less of an economic threat than SARS, and he was optimistic the worst of the SARS outbreak had passed.

He said the virus looked like it would be brought under control by the end of June, and economic activity would probably be restored to normal about two months later.

"By the end of August, I think the economic activities that were affected by SARS will be back to normal," he told reporters after his speech.

The deadly SARS virus delivered a shock to Asian economies, keeping consumers out of shops and restaurants and tourists out of the region. Last month, an APEC council said that health measures to prevent the spread of the virus must not be used as an excuse for trade protectionism.

While APEC was working on a position to take to the WTO talks, a failure to meet deadlines last week in Geneva on how to cut tariffs on industrial goods and to reform the WTO's dispute settlement system highlighted the obstacles to free trade.

"As it stands we've now missed so many deadlines already and we find that positions have not changed very much," Malaysian Trade Minister Rafidah Aziz said about the status of the WTO negotiations.

"There have been proposals to cut tariffs but for us, for example, they are not enough," she said.

Implementing percentage cuts in tariffs, rather than setting a level they should fall to, was meaningless because high-tariff countries would still impose high tariffs -- a criticism she said applied to both developed and developing countries.

APEC's member economies are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, the US and Vietnam.
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