Following the failure of the WTO ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico, due to gaps in agricultural subsidies, trade ministers attending the Boao Forum for Asia annual conference fixed their eyes on free trade areas (FTAs) and regional trade arrangements (RTAs).

Jim Sutton, minister for trade negotiations of New Zealand, said regional and bilateral FTAs could serve as "building blocks" rather than stumbling blocks for the multilateral process.

He said to find the balance to allow all 148 WTO members to agree to a successful outcome was a pressure for the three-year timeframe of the Doha round. "This is where regional agreements and bilateral FTAs can help support the multilateral process."

Mark Vaile, Australian trade minister, said closer economic integration, including through free trade agreements, might deliver gains more quickly than the WTO in some areas. "Such integration can be an important complement to the multilateral system."

Philippine Secretary of Trade and Industry Cesar Purisima expressed his wish to allay fears for the Doha round not completing before Jan. 1, 2005.

"While we remain hopeful that we can find consensus on the complex issues we face, if the WTO were to miss the deadline, the results would still be within the range of what is normal judging from the experience in the Tokyo round of the 1970s and the Uruguay Round that concluded in 1994," Purisima said.

However, the international community should move on even if it means undertaking other trade policy alternatives, though this does not mean less importance of the global trading system.

If Asia wants to maintain the dynamism in the Asian economy, itshould no longer rely solely on the multilateral drive for greaterliberalization, said Hwuang Doo-yun, minister for trade of the Republic of Korea.

"We need to establish institutional infrastructures for regional integration that can further facilitate economic development in Asia," Hwang said.

He said the main avenue of future efforts should be to promote RTAs among countries in the region and FTAs can be linked to create an architecture of regional arrangements that covers all ofAsia.

Goji Sakamoto, Japanese senior vice minister of economy, trade and industry, said though the WTO will continue to function at thecenter of the multilateral trading system, it is sometimes possible to achieve much higher levels of liberalization with these politically and economically close countries and regions than it would be within the WTO's very diverse membership make-up.

Yu Guangzhou, Chinese vice minister of commerce, said the basicpolicy of the Chinese government is to actively engage in and promote the regional economic cooperation process.

"As a country situated in Asia, we shall join the efforts for the accelerated pace of regional and sub-regional economic cooperation in Asia with an aim to achieve a win-win through side-by-side development," he said.

Since China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) agreed to set up a FTA by 2010, bilateral trade has greatlyincreased. In 2003, China's export to the ASEAN countries increased by 31.2 percent while its export from the ASEAN countries to China grew by 51.8 percent.

"This speaks out clearly for itself that the economic diversification is just an important driver for regional economic cooperation," said Yu.

Rapid progress in regional economic integration has been witnessed around the world over the last few years. As of January 2004, the number of RTAs in various modalities notified to the WTOhad reached 293. While in the five decades of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) system, only 124 RTAs were notified. The rest are made after the WTO was set up in 1995.

Source: Xinhua