KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam have agreed to give flexibilities in the ongoing Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) negotiations to help narrow the gaps towards achieving a consensus.
International Trade and Industry Minister Datuk Seri Mustapa Mohamed, together with his counterparts had apprised the meeting on issues and challenges faced in achieving consensus on certain elements of the modalities related to goods, services and investment respectively.
"It would be difficult to reach consensus given the different levels of economic development of participating countries," he said, in a statement after the third RCEP Inter-sessional Ministerial Meeting which was concluded in Hanoi today.
The 16 countries are the 10 Asean member countries and their partners namely China, Japan, India, Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
"These flexibilities are allowed in the initial stage to cater to the different levels of ambition of the RCEP member countries.
"This does not in any way undermine our commitment to ensure that RCEP remains a quality agreement and commercially beneficial to all parties involved," he added.
The RCEP – acknowledged as the only 'mega FTA' negotiated globally, has seen 18 rounds of negotiations since the first one held in Brunei in 2013.
The meeting was to take stock of the status of RCEP negotiations including the challenges faced and to provide political guidance to the negotiators on key outstanding areas namely goods, services and investment and in the rules, with the view to push for a timely conclusion of RCEP negotiations.
According to Mustapa, the negotiations are progressing at a moderate pace and a number of challenges were addressed at the Hanoi meeting.
"The willingness of Asean to go beyond the existing Asean+1 FTA is due to RCEP's value and its economic significance to Asean and the partner countries," he said, adding that it also demonstrates the strong commitment of Asean to engage the partner countries in creating this mega FTA.
The ministers had also discussed extensively a number of "rules based" issues and agreed that some working groups such as the WG on Rules of Origin on Trade in Goods should be allowed to meet inter-sessionally to expedite their work given that the work done and rules developed are highly technical.
They were however confident that the negotiations remained on track.
"A number of progress were made in all areas of negotiations and to date, two out of 20 chapters of the RCEP Agreement namely on economic and technical cooperation, and on SMEs have been concluded. Some of the remaining chapters are nearing conclusion." he said.
Senior officials will be meeting for the 19th round of negotiations in Hyderabad, India scheduled from July 19 to 28 while the ministers will be meeting in September this year in the Philippines to further review the progress and any specific issues that remain unresolved.