APEC considers widening club to count India
CANBERRA - Asia-Pacific states will discuss widening their summit grouping for the first time in a decade to include India, as heavyweights China, Japan and the United States vie over who should guide regional integration, Australia said on Thursday.
Senior officials from the 21 APEC nations gather in the Australian capital on Monday to open week-long talks ahead of a regional leaders’ meeting in Sydney in September.
A focus would be whether a 10-year moratorium on new APEC members agreed in Canada in 1996 should be overturned to allow up to a dozen countries to join the grouping, including emerging powerhouse India, Pakistan, Columbia, Cambodia and Mongolia.
“Clearly it is India that will weigh heavily on people’s minds about the potential for a new member,” Australian ambassador to APEC David Spencer told journalists.
Australia founded the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in 1989 to push economic integration, and its current membership accounts for around half of world trade.
Canberra, host to the grouping in 2007, is determined that APEC remains the leading forum of the Asia-Pacific, as it draws in the United States, its close ally.
But China is pushing for regional economic integration through a rival grouping of the 10 nations of Southeast Asia (ASEAN) along with South Korea, China and Japan.
Japan is backing an Asia trading bloc on the platform of the fledgling 16-nation East Asia Summit, which meets next week in the Philippines and counts Australia, New Zealand and India among Asian members, and also China.
The strengthening of rival summits had reinvigorated US interest in APEC expansion, said Malcolm Cook, programme director for Asia and the Pacific at Australia’s Lowy Institute...cont'd
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