Australia trade deal offers Japan leverage in TPP talks

TOKYO, Apr 9 (AFP) : Shinzo Abe's success in signing a free-trade deal with Australia proves Japan's prime minister can bend the once-powerful farm sector to his will, experts say, offering leverage against US claims of intransigence in a wider pan-Pacific deal.
Tokyo looks set to make the most of its triumph, which came just weeks before US President Barack Obama arrives in Japan on a state visit that had at one point been expected to crown the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
The Japan-Australia deal was signed Monday after Abe's summit with Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and followed seven years of sometimes torturous negotiations.
The agreement will see Australia drop its five per cent duty on small and mid-sized Japanese cars-something of a symbolic move for a country that is soon to lose the last of its auto plants.
In exchange, Canberra has partially prised open Japan's tightly-controlled agricultural markets, winning an up-to-50 per cent cut in steep tariffs on imported Australian beef.
The deal "puts pressure on the United States over deadlocked talks with Japan" that form a key plank of the TPP project, said Takaaki Asano, research fellow at the Tokyo Foundation.
At issue is what Washington and many of the other parties to the talks-which also involve Chile, Mexico, Canada and several Asian countries-see as Japan's unwillingness to open its lucrative agricultural market.
Putative suitors have long complained that sky-high tariffs-on rice it is nearly 800 per cent-and non-tariff barriers, like overly-strict safety requirements, are naked protectionism pandering to a powerful farming sector. Japan's farmers-largely elderly, conservative and with smallholdings that would barely be worth tilling in many countries-have traditionally been a formidable political force.
Through large and well-organised cooperatives they have backstopped Abe's Liberal Democratic Party, helping it to maintain a virtual stranglehold on Japanese politics since the mid-1950s.