Asia Pacific leaders will make another attempt to break the prolonged deadlock in global trade negotiations at their annual meeting in Australia next month, an official said Monday.
Presidents and prime ministers from the 21-member Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum are expected to issue a statement aimed at helping revive the moribund talks, said Colin Heseltine, executive director of the Singapore-based Apec secretariat.
"What Apec leaders, I think, will be putting their minds to in a couple of weeks is what they can do in terms of trying to push the Doha Round of negotiations forward, to get some progress," Heseltine told a media briefing.
"This will be one of the important priorities in Sydney in September." Heseltine said it was not clear at this point what form the leaders' statement will take or how stronger it can get in order to break the impasse among World Trade Organisation (WTO) members. "Negotiations are going on in Geneva during this current period, and so just precisely where Apec can fit in and what it can do I think we will just have to wait and see," he said.
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