USTR Reports Strong Progress In TPP Talks

by Mike Godfrey, Tax-News.com, Washington

06 April 2011

The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has confirmed that the United States and its Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) partners - Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam - made considerable progress in their sixth round of trade agreement negotiations held recently in Singapore.

In fact, to ensure they had the time they needed to maximize progress, the TPP countries extended the length of the round in Singapore. Some US negotiators also travelled to Malaysia and Vietnam before and after the formal round to advance the market access negotiations.

During this round, it was reported that substantial headway has been made toward developing the legal texts of a TPP agreement, which include commitments covering all aspects of the participating countries' trade and investment relationship. It was added that negotiating teams were able to narrow the gaps in their positions on a wide range of issues across the more than 25 chapters of that agreement.

The US and other countries have put forward new legal text in a range of areas, including industrial goods, sanitary and phytosanitary issues, technical barriers to trade, and environment. In addition, the USTR said that the US has tabled a legal text on regulatory coherence, a new issue to feature for the first time in a trade agreement that is aimed at making the regulatory systems of the TPP countries operate more seamlessly.

The TPP countries also had good exchanges on initial US proposals on the other cross-cutting issues of competitiveness and facilitating business, how to promote the participation of small- and medium-sized businesses in international trade, deepening the production and supply chain linkages between the TPP countries, and promoting development.

Prior to the start of the round, the TPP teams exchanged initial offers on services and investment, government procurement, and product-specific rules of origin, as well as requests on for improvements in the initial offers on goods. The discussions of these offers during this round were constructive and a good first step toward producing an ambitious market access package and a TPP rule of origin, which will support regional integration.

In addition, the TPP countries committed to working to build further on the momentum achieved during this round of negotiations, so as to ensure further meaningful progress in the seventh round, which will be held during the week of June 20 in Vietnam. It was confirmed that the TPP countries are seeking to make as much progress as possible ahead of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders' meeting in November in Honolulu.

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