Chinese and New Zealand officials should make solid progress at
the 10th round of China - New Zealand FTA (free trade area)
negotiations, which began yesterday, New Zealand's ambassador in
Beijing said.
Over 30 negotiators from New Zealand are attending the week-long
talks.?
"The talks have entered a substantive stage. They will get
further and further into the negotiations, and good progress is
expected," said ambassador Tony Browne. "The more discussions they
have, the more agreements on a high-quality FTA they reach."
Since November 2004 when the FTA talks began, nine rounds of
negotiations have been held. Browne predicted they would be
finished "within timeframe," and probably "earlier than April 2008
as planned."
In April 2006 when Premier Wen Jiabao met New Zealand Prime Minister Helen
Clark, a consensus was reached to establish "a comprehensive,
high-quality, balanced and mutually acceptable FTA" within two
years.
"This means the FTA agreements should try to cover as many areas
as possible and bring all-around positive changes to both nations,"
Browne said.
However, this process is "demanding, time-consuming, and is
difficult to work through" due to the negotiations covering not
only trade in goods but also in terms of services and
investment.
The situation is similar to that of the ongoing China-Australia
FTA talks, which also cover these three areas, but faces
difficulties on agreements for the service and agricultural
sectors.
Fortunately, "ours is less complex than the China-Australia
one," Browne said. "New Zealand is a much smaller economy. There
are many sectors that are significant to Australia, yet not that
important to New Zealand."
"The agriculture industry, particularly the dairy-producing
sector, is the major one which gave rise to a lot of arguments," he
said.
New Zealand is one of the largest dairy producers in the world,
and a common fear is that a liberalized market would place Chinese
dairy producers at a disadvantage.
However, the ambassador said there were many reasons to believe
New Zealand players would not force anyone out of the China
market.
"China's dairy producers, like Mengniu and Sanlu, are more and
more competitive, they are developing into global brands thanks to
good management and high quality, and New Zealand's export volume
to China is still small and there is low likelihood of an influx of
exports after the removal of tariffs," he said.
(China Daily January 30, 2007)
