China FTA boost may finally be done
Jacinda Ardern gets down to business at the East Asia Summit today in Bangkok with double-header trade announcements expected and a three-hour meeting with Asian leaders to thrash out regional problems.
But on the trade front, Ardern said from her own experience that anything could happen with the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership
(RCEP), which includes India.
In the first trade announcement, leaders of 16 countries in the RCEP trade negotiations (started in 2012) are expected to announce a partial completion of the deal even though India remains a reluctant player.
And it is likely that the upgrade of New Zealand’s 2008 FTA with China (started in 2016) will get the final tick in a meeting between Ardern and Premier Li Keqiang, possibly late tonight.
Ardern’s first overseas outing as Prime Minister was to Vietnam where the TransPacific Partnership trade deal (TPP) was about to be clinched but it ended up being delayed by four months.
“If I learned anything from those early attendances at meetings within the region, where there’s a trade agenda, anything can happen,” she told the Herald before this summit.
“In my mind CPTPP [Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership] and [RCEP] feels to me like we are at a similar point in the negotiation where there’s a significant amount of pressure to conclude and a real unknown factor there.”
She said for New Zealand, India was an important part of the agreement “but at the same time there are a number of countries that just wish to see completion”.
On the China upgrade, she hoped to announce the conclusion of it very soon.
Asked if she thought it could be delayed because New Zealand joined other United Nations countries last week in a statement aimed as pressing China on the detention of Uighers in Xinjiang, Ardern
said: “I’m absolutely comfortable that we have been really consistent, that I have taken the opportunity to raise it face to face [with Chinese leaders] . . . but also alongside others within multilateral forums.”
India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, will be at the summit, with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who plays an increasingly important leadership role in trade, Australian Prime
Minister Scott Morrison, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Indonesia President Joko Widodo. RCEP is an agreement of two halves: one on the rules of trade among the 16 nations, the other a series of marketaccess agreements. Talks on the rules have been completed and that may be trumpeted despite market access being the sticking point. The rules are not without benefit to New
Zealand. For example, getting certification for the export of seafood, which can at present take several days will be cut to six hours in RCEP countries.
But market access is the problem area for India, especially in sensitive areas such as agriculture, and it has concerns about its domestic market being flooded with Chinese goods.
India has been the raison d’etre of the RCEP trade talks, because most of the other participants (the 10 Asean countries, plus China, South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand) already have free trade deals with each other. The whole purpose of RCEP was to draw India into modern trading arrangements.
But India has been reluctant throughout and rendered RCEP the least ambitious trade talks NZ has been a part of.
Officials and trade ministers, including Damien O’Connor, continued talks in Bangkok at the weekend and O’Connor is due to visit India straight after in a trip focusing on market access structures.
Expectations were lowered last year because Modi faced an election and trade was a sensitive subject but he comes to this year’s summit with the election over, and having secured an outright majority.
Among the issues likely to get an airing today are the South China Sea, persecution of Rohingya by Myanmar, climate change and missile testing by North Korea.