Japanese officials on Thursday proposed a sprawling 16-nation free-trade grouping with China, South Korea, Australia, India, New Zealand and the 10-nation Southeast Asian bloc, officials said. The 16 last year formed the East Asia Summit - seen as a precursor of a giant free-trade community embracing half the world's population.
"Minister (Toshihiro) Nikai will certainly speak out about that at the lunch of the 16 ministers next week," Ramon Vicente Kabigting, a director at the Philippines' department of trade and industry told reporters.
Kabigting said that economic officials from each of the countries meeting here this week would have to brief their ministers who are holding their annual dialogue in the Malaysian capital next week.
"When the (ASEAN) ministers meet among themselves before they meet their dialogue partners, they will have some rough dimensions of their response," he said.
This is the first time Japan has raised the proposal to ASEAN and its dialogue partners China, Japan and South Korea - known as ASEAN Plus 3 - who gathered here Thursday.
An ASEAN official indicated there was a cautious response to the ambitious idea, saying it was met with silence in the closed-door meetings.
"We were looking at each other. Our silence does not mean we oppose it or we welcome it," he told AFP.
India, Japan and Australia are hoping that the East Asia Summit will be the first step towards a free-trade East Asia Community but even the concept's proponents say it is decades from reality.
Immediately after the meeting, Japanese officials began lobbying for ASEAN's support for their free-trade agreement idea.
"We are telling them we lack manpower resources. This is a problem faced by some ASEAN countries. We are already working on a number of FTAs. But we will have to brief our ministers," the ASEAN official told AFP.
Japan's first FTA, with Singapore, took effect in late 2002 and Japan has since agreed on deals with Mexico, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.
It is involved in ongoing negotiations with Indonesia, South Korea and the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations as a whole.
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