With the motto, “Towards a Dynamic Community for Sustainable Development and Prosperity” the APEC 2006 Summit, Hanoi, has certainly paved a way for all member nations to work together towards making global economy stronger, dissolving all issues, and give global economy a whopping boost of at least $96 billion a year. The 21-member APEC forum have pledged to revive the deadlock and give a new direction to the WTO talks, that failed four months back in Doha owing to differences over farm subsidies.

The main issues concerned:

1. Cut trade barriers in real sense to enhance global trade keeping in mind profit of all parties concerned
2. More agricultural concessions
3. Give fillip to agricultural market access
4. Real industrial tariff cuts
5. Expanding services trade with collective members’ consensus
6. Analyzing the demand of poorer countries to end export subsidies and tariffs that restrict them from selling farm goods to rich countries
7. To make APEC stronger so that it can come out as a collective force and play a constructive role in combating terrorism and dilute unwanted trade barriers.

The 14th APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting ended with a positive note:

1. Vietnam joined as the newest member of the WTO.
2. Russia and US signed bilateral market access agreement moving Russia closer to join WTO. The agreement will boost trade between the two nations and will pave way for more market opportunities for US exporters and industrialists, especially in the field of agriculture, duty-free movement of IT products under the Information Technology Agreement (ITA), tariff reduction on civil aircraft bodies and parts, and also agricultural, construction, scientific and medical equipments.
3. APEC leaders pledged to resume Doha talks with emphasis on practical measures
4. The leaders chalked out plans to reform APEC, make it more effective, and play a vital role in global economy.
5. The leaders committed to fight terrorism and restore peace in the world and region
6. The meet gave Sino-US relations, including trade, a positive direction. Both presidents agreed to work together and solve grave issues such as North Korea and Iran’s nuclear developments.
7. Japan and Chile moved a step further to accelerate Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiations

This is the first time member nations came together with an open mind and showed willingness to open markets further. We would like leaders to come to a common consensus and create the much-anticipated ‘Free Trade Bloc’ as soon as possible. The slashing of cross-border trade cost across the region by another 5 per cent by 2010 is welcomed. However, the world leaders in the summit showed little maturity in dealing with North Korea and Iran’s nuclear threat. The leaders emphasized on applying strict sanctions, rather then resuming talks with the two nations and solve the problem and here the main endeavor of APEC to boost global economy takes a back seat. We’ll have to wait and see how far these measures will help the developing countries.

Via: BBC