Courtesy of Brunei Times published on November 25th, 2006

ASIA-Pacific business leaders yesterday called for an Asia-Pacific free trade area to counter the increase of mini-pacts that are adding costs and complexity to doing business in the region.The Apec Business Advisory Council (Abac) also urged leaders of the 21 Pacific rim economies meeting in Hanoi to take stronger steps to curb trade in pirated goods and develop better plans to deal with pandemics such as bird flu.

At their annual meeting ahead of the Apec summit this weekend, the business council noted that bilateral and regional trade pacts have blossomed in recent years, while a vast Apec-wide zone had yet to get off the drawing board.

‘‘Abac strongly urges leaders to develop an Apec initiative to promote convergence and consolidation among existing agreements, and those currently being negotiated,’’ the group said in a report prepared for the leaders’ summit.

Abac, comprising three senior business people from each Apec economy, also urged leaders to renew efforts at the summit to revive the Doha round of global trade talks, which collapsed in July.

The global trade round was a‘‘once in a generation opportunity to make progress on trade liberalisation and must end in a positive outcome for the world trading community’’, the Abac report said.

 The business leaders said that while considerable progress had been made in intellectual property protection ‘‘traffic in counterfeit products continues to grow faster than the trade in legitimate products’’.

 The council also saw a ‘‘critical need for more information about avian influenza’’, to help the Asia-Pacific business community ‘‘prepare continuity plans for the possibility of a future health pandemic’’. Vietnam’s President Nguyen Minh Triet told the opening session of Abac that Asia-Pacific economies had achieved above average growth rates despite an unstable oil market.’ That shows the liberalization of trade and investment is indeed stimulation for promoting development and bringing in prosperity for the entire Apec region in general, and each economy in particular,’’ said the president in his opening speech.

 Fauziah Dato Talib, CEO and founder of Brunei’s IQ Quest Company, who was one of the Sultanate’s three representatives for Abac, said the importance of logistics was highlighted in the meeting. ‘‘ Logistics is critical for commerce within the region, how in this respect we need to place more emphasis on logistics.

 ‘‘What does this say for Brunei? How can Brunei take advantage of this? We’ve been working on an investment opportunity for Brunei which identifies logistics as one of the areas or industry where we can actually leverage on.

 ‘‘As you know, the monitor group came up with four pillars that are more specific for Brunei– logistics, tourism, financial services, business services.

 When you look at that and you think about how Brunei can leverage on this, we were putting together this file for Brunei on logistics where we found a lot of impact on other added value ideas for Brunei,’’ she said when met after the meeting.

 Her partner in IQ Quest, Alexandre Legendre, said the meeting would help Brunei develop on the technology by utilising the relationships with countries that were far developed in the respective field.

 ‘‘Whether you develop the technology in-house, or, you bring them in from foreign countries, and you apply it to the region, and this is what Brunei can do because they can take advantage of the technologies from other countries and make use of it.

 ‘‘And then what happens is you have an impact on all those other industries, for example halal strategies, or anything that has to do with the infrastructure of IT to support some kind of leadership role for logistics.’’