SINGAPORE, Aug 24 (AFP): Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is set this week to finalise a free trade agreement with India and hold talks with Australia and New Zealand, signalling the importance of regional pacts amid fading hopes for a global trading regime.
ASEAN economic ministers, meeting in Singapore from Monday to Friday, are expected to put the final touches on an ASEAN-India trade in goods pact agreed on by senior officials earlier this month.
The deal covering billions of dollars is expected to be signed during the ASEAN-India summit in December, officials have said.
ASEAN economic ministers will also hold talks with their counterparts from Australia and New Zealand in an effort to have a trade agreement ready for signing by December, a Southeast Asian diplomatic source said.
Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said recently Canberra hoped to conclude the talks with the 10-member ASEAN in Singapore, but the source said this might not be possible because certain issues still have to be resolved.
But the source added the issues, one of them concerning the rights of New Zealand's indigenous peoples, were minor. He was confident a deal will be reached in time for the ASEAN summit in Bangkok in December.
ASEAN has agreed to gradually tear down barriers to trade in goods and services with China and South Korea and has signed a wide-ranging economic partnership deal with Japan, which also covers investments.
Forging the trade links with India and the two Pacific nations will complete the bloc's ties with all its key Asia-Pacific trading partners, and could be a catalyst for a region-wide free-trade zone, officials said.
ASEAN has a combined population of about 550 million people. It is a diverse group which ranges from high-tech Singapore to poverty-stricken Myanmar, and the world's most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia.
ASEAN is already a free-trade area with 90 per cent of goods traded having tariffs between zero and five per cent.
This week the ministers are expected to discuss the impact of high oil and food prices and the escalating global economic slowdown on their economies.
But officials said the overriding focus would be on efforts to achieve a single market and manufacturing base by 2015 to raise ASEAN's profile in the face of competition from China and India.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB), in a recent study on Asian regionalism, said "substantial gains could be realised from consolidating the many FTAs into a single, region-wide one" and from adopting practices to guide future regional and sub-regional FTAs.
