| |
| |
 |
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
SINGAPORE: US President Barack Obama and 20 other Asia-Pacific leaders convened Sunday at a moment of truth for the crisis-hit world economy and for global efforts to fight climate change.
The leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum were to wrap up a two-day summit with pledges to fight trade protectionism and keep open the taps of stimulus spending to sustain a fledgling economic recovery.
The Hawaii-born and Indonesia-raised Obama, who joined the Singapore gathering late Saturday after a visit to Tokyo, proclaimed himself the "Pacific president" and declared the United States was back as a regional player.
But APEC leaders maintained a drumbeat of criticism over Obama's perceived neglect of free trade, with Congress and powerful Democratic barons in the trade union movement clamouring to protect US industry as joblessness soars.
In one development welcomed by APEC allies, Obama said the United States was interested in an obscure trade pact that leaders say could become the nucleus for a massive trans-Pacific free-trade zone covering 2.6 billion people.
According to their draft summit declaration, the leaders will instruct their officials to explore the viability of the APEC-wide pact stretching from Chile and China, which would encompass more than half the world economy.
But they will back off a pledge mentioned in earlier drafts seen by AFP to halve their greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2050, officials said following a round of haggling on the summit's first day on Saturday.
The 50-percent target had proven "very controversial", said Yi Xianliang, a foreign ministry official who is part of China's negotiating team for world climate change talks in Copenhagen next month.
The meeting in the Danish capital is supposed to iron out a new binding treaty to avert what most scientists say is the threat of worldwide catastrophe from runaway global warming.
Loathe to settle for watered-down climate commitments, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd convened a breakfast meeting on Sunday of key players including Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao on the summit sidelines.
Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen flew in at the last minute to join the talks, where the consensus was that it was "unrealistic" to expect a legally binding agreement in Copenhagen, according to one US official.
Deputy national security adviser Mike Froman echoed other national officials who have said that Copenhagen will instead be a stepping stone with negotiations to continue next year.
APEC encompasses the world's two biggest greenhouse gas emitters, China and the United States, which are at loggerheads over how to divide up responsibility for fighting climate change in the run-up to Copenhagen.
Obama meanwhile called in Tokyo for "balanced and sustained" growth around the world in the post-crisis phase, pressing Asian exporters including China to wean themselves off US consumers and build up their own demand.
His comments underlined a central theme of the APEC summit - that the world economy must be rebalanced so that voracious US consumerism is no longer the sole cylinder firing global growth.
At the Singapore meetings, President Hu has played up China's role in shoring up world growth after the crisis engulfed the United States, and vowed to "vigorously expand" its domestic market.
However, criticism that China keeps an artificial lid on its currency to gain an unfair trade edge has flared anew at APEC. Obama is expected to press Hu on the exchange-rate row when the two leaders meet in Beijing next week.
- AFP/ir
|
