Japan to feed political will, break rigidity in free trade talks+

TOKYO, Nov. 6 Kyodo -
Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada said Friday that Japan must feed political will
to break the country's rigidity that has been seen in some of its talks with
other economies for trade and investment liberalization.

The comment came after the government held the first session of a new committee
joined by four ministers related to negotiations for bilateral or multilateral
free trade agreements and with global liberalization talks under the World
Trade Organization.
''I heard from many and (concluded that) there may be room where political will
could work a little bit more,'' Okada told reporters.
He also said that even as the Japanese government stresses the importance of
free trade in general, such aspiration tends to be weakened at the level of
individual negotiators, some of whom appear inclined to protect the interest of
the jurisdiction or industries they oversee.
The joint panel is made up of the foreign, trade, finance and farm ministers.
Okada said they plan to hold a meeting every month, and that their deputies
will meet twice in a month.
Okada has recently showed his persistence over a possible FTA with the European
Union, which is strongly backed by Japanese business leaders.
Tokyo is still in the early stages of studying the possibility of a free trade
pact with the 27-member union, having launched a private-public joint study
panel ahead of formal intergovernmental talks.
Last month, trade officials from Japan and Australia agreed there is a need to
accelerate their efforts to strike an FTA as their talks have become stalled
two and a half years after their commencement. Some Japanese officials have
admitted that the stalemate is due mainly to Japan's reluctance to open its
agricultural sector to cheaper imports from Australia.
Japan is also in similar talks with India, South Korea, Peru and a group of
Middle East countries but has yet to reach a breakthrough. Meanwhile it has
concluded FTAs with such countries as Singapore, Mexico and Chile, with whom
Tokyo suffered little friction over farm trade.
The WTO, struggling to make tangible progress in its eight-year-old Doha Round
liberalization talks, will hold a ministerial meeting in later November and
early December.
Okada said the government's newly launched committee will gather ahead of the
WTO meeting and confirm Japan's basic positions.
Broad agreement has been reached in many areas of the Doha talks, launched in
2001 and originally scheduled to be concluded in 2005. But the negotiations
have been stalled due chiefly to differences between developed and developing
countries over how much to cut farm subsidies and industrial and agricultural
tariffs.
==Kyodo
2009-11-06 22:49:25