ASEAN Wins Friends, Influence as China Draw Grows
Anxiety around east and Southeast Asia about sluggish economic growth in the United States, number one export market for most countries in the region, helped focus ministerial minds.
More powerful still for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is the rapid rise of northern neighbor China, whose growing global challenge has brought suitors to ASEAN's gates.
While the 10-country zone is nowhere near becoming a world trade heavyweight, it has caught other capitals' attention, as evidenced this week in Bandar Seri Begawan, Reuters reported.
Host country Brunei, with a population of just over 300,000 people, welcomed regional powers Japan and China through its doors, where ASEAN ministers played one against the other to push forward free trade areas (FTAs) with both.
South Korea also came talking trade zones, promising to study the possibility, while Australia and New Zealand said their newly signed ASEAN partnership deal was better than an FTA at knocking down barriers to doing business.
Close behind them all came India -- its domestic market of more than a billion people putting it second only to China in terms of population -- for a first ever, getting-to-know-you visit to the annual ASEAN trade talks.
ASEAN critics say its endless meetings and addiction to consensus yields little more than bland statements of good intent, meaning it risks missing out on the real chances offered by its new-found friends.
Yet amid the Brunei talk were potentially significant shifts.
Not least was Japan's enthusiasm for an ASEAN FTA, with Tokyo's minister declaring a readiness to throw even hypersensitive sectors such as agriculture into negotiations.
The news came just hours after trade ministers from ASEAN, which groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, pushed forward their talks with China.
The two sides agreed a fast-track, partial introduction of ASEAN's China FTA from 2004, with full implementation in 2011.
ASEAN's target of a free trade area with China, unveiled in Brunei last year, jolted Japan into action in a region it has invested in heavily over the years to build up its overseas electronics manufacturing facilities.
Whether Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's government can deliver depends on what trade morsels he can slip past political opponents and interest groups in his own party.
The gap between rhetoric and reality can be wide in the southeast Asian bloc, not least when it comes to its own ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA), says academic Mari Elka Pangestu of Jakarta's Center for International and Strategic Studies.
"If you look at the data on who is actually using the preferential tariffs, I think the percentage of importers is not large," she said, adding that AFTA rates were not so different from those offered more widely under the bloc's World Trade Organization commitments.
She said deeper economic ties with China, Japan and South Korea made sense for ASEAN, but she questioned whether the bloc had the necessary desire to go for it.
"Unless there's going to be the political will to take the bold steps then we'll probably have slow progress," she told Reuters by telephone this week.
The man with the broadest smile in Brunei was possibly Singapore's Trade Minister George Yeo, who said he saw his country's policy of striking bilateral FTAs beyond the ASEAN bloc gain wider acceptance.
"The real issues now are liberalization of services and non-tariff barriers. We've got to make major progress in that area it won't be easy," Yeo said of AFTA's challenges. Asked why things appeared to have moved in Brunei, Yeo said: "The Chinese are serious. And because the Chinese are serious everyone else has to be serious."