Saturday, July 10, 2010

No TIFA meeting proposed yet: AIT head

Taipei, July 10 (CNA) The United States hopes to resume trade talks with Taiwan as soon as possible after a setback over imports of U.S. beef, but no meeting has been proposed by either side yet, American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Director William Stanton said Saturday.

"We need to move forward, especially now that the ECFA is behind Taiwan, " Stanton said, referring to the economic cooperation framework agreement which Taiwan and China signed on June 29 that the government says will boost trade between the two countries.

Taiwan's Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs Lin Sheng-chung said Friday that Taiwan will continue to communicate with the U.S. on the row over beef imports through bilateral consultation channels and under the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA).

The TIFA framework has provided an official channel for Taiwan-U.S. dialogue on trade and economic issues since the agreement was signed in September 1994.

The U.S. hopes to resume talks but there are many factors to take into account, Stanton told reporters on the sideline of a forum, adding that there's no plan to get together for a meeting until both sides are well prepared and have a clear idea about the agenda.

"Nobody has proposed a meeting yet, " he said. "I think everybody knows we have this dispute over beef imports with the amendment over the beef agreement. That obviously has set us back."

Taiwan's Legislature passed an amendment in January to the Act Governing Food Safety that bans imports of various beef products from countries with documented cases of mad cow disease in the past decade.

The amendment effectively bars U.S. ground beef, beef offal and other beef parts from Taiwan's market, in contravention of a bilateral beef trade protocol signed last October.

Because of the disagreement over U.S. beef, the TIFA negotiations scheduled to take place early this year in Taipei were delayed. However, Stanton stressed that the U.S. is not setting any preconditions to reopen the TIFA talks.

Meanwhile, Stanton reiterated the U.S. position that it has no intention of signing a free trade agreement (FTA) with Taiwan at present, saying that it's a different issue from the TIFA talks.

"As you noticed, Taiwan has been very careful with which products to put on the early harvest list... which agricultural products to be included, " he said, noting that agricultural commodities would inevitably be a difficult issue if the two sides were to negotiate an FTA.

The FTAs the U.S. has signed with other countries, such as South Korea and Australia, are always "very inclusive" and usually "include everything."

"So I'm not sure that we are at that stage yet, " he said. (By Chris Wang) enditem/ls