Features

Deborah Elms, head of Singapore’s Temasek Foundation Centre for Trade & Negotiations, a trainer in training cooperation programmes organised by Vietnam Foreign Service Training Centre, gets VIR’s Phuong Thu up to date on the ongoing TPP negotiations and the benefits the new regional agreement will bring to Vietnam.

Deborah Elms

Do you have an update on the on-going TPP negotiations among nine countries including the US, Singapore, Vietnam and Japan?

The negotiations are continuing. There was a meeting last week in Malaysia with some of the negotiating teams. The next full round is not scheduled until March. The two biggest challenges between now and March is sorting through some of the tough issues on the table inside the domestic level for each TPP member and figuring out how to address the desires of Japan, Canada and Mexico to join the talks.

At the Hawaii meeting of APEC, the ministers gave their approval to the negotiators to move ahead with certain elements of the agenda. This means that officials have to work through some elements of their positions at home now, so they are ready to meet again with everyone next year.

What biggest benefits Vietnam will gain from being among the first members of TPP?

It is always better to be at the table in a negotiation and to help shape the outcome than to join talks later and have to accept an agreement that someone else negotiated. Vietnam is especially able to make sure that its interests and the interests of developing countries in the TPP are represented in the final agreement as much as possible. If it was not there, it would just have to take provisions that would probably be more difficult to implement than what it will finally get in this agreement.

What are the difficulties on Vietnam’s side in its TPP negotiations? What are your recommendations to the Vietnamese government for sorting out the problems to speed up the country’s TPP negotiations?

I think most of the problems for Vietnam could be expected. The biggest problem might be one of capacity. It’s just difficult to engage in this intense type of negotiation, in English, if you haven’t done something like this before. The Americans, for example, will show up for these two-week-long negotiation sessions with at least 200 people on their teams.

They have people who have worked with similar FTA templates and are familiar with the issues and the legal language and the benefits and drawbacks of certain approaches to most agenda items. They have a good idea of how to work with the domestic ministries too to build support at home for their positions.

These kinds of experiences are not always true for their Vietnamese counterparts. This can’t really be speeded up, but comes with time and experience. Some specific areas of difficulty for Vietnam have been textiles.

Vietnam has yet to start official FTA negotiations with the EU. We heard the EU is now looking at other countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia or Singapore. Do you have any advice for Vietnam on this point?

I would not suggest tackling the EU and TPP at the same time, at least not until the TPP negotiations are winding up.

The capacity bottlenecks are just too great. It has taken Singapore nearly two years to negotiate with the EU and Singapore is an open market with deep experience negotiating FTAs. I suspect that if you try to do both at the same time, you might make decisions in both agreements that you will later regret.

However, having done the TPP, negotiating with the EU should be much easier, as many of the same topics and issues will reappear. Your officials will be more familiar with the process and tradeoffs with the domestic-level support system in place. The whole process of negotiating should proceed more quickly with fewer surprises.