Koizumi shies from talk of free trade

By PAULA OLIVER

The Japanese Prime Minister was not ready to talk about an open trade agreement with New Zealand during a brief visit to Wellington yesterday.

Junichiro Koizumi spent just 16 hours in the country, during which he met Prime Minister Helen Clark.

It followed a visit to Australia, where he agreed Japan would begin designing a framework for free-trade discussions.

But his talks in New Zealand did not go that far.

Helen Clark said New Zealand was ready to talk about an open trade agreement with Japan as soon as Japan was ready.

"Right now Japan is not ready to discuss a free-trade agreement, which would have to include agriculture because that's the bottom line we've applied," she said.

Koizumi spoke of including New Zealand in an expanded East Asian trade community, a suggestion he made during a speech in Singapore this year.

He said he hoped New Zealand and Australia would be core members of an expanded group. The other members of the East Asian bloc would be the Asean countries and the three North Asian powers, Japan, China and Korea.

Clark said she welcomed the idea, and saw enormous potential for New Zealand in the Japanese market in several areas - attracting international students, tourism, forestry, and opportunities for new-economy sectors such as biotechnology.

Japan is New Zealand's third-largest trading partner, buying more than $4 billion of New Zealand products a year.

In the absence of a free-trade agreement soon, Helen Clark said she would continue to work to develop areas she discussed while on a visit to Japan last April - where there were not significant barriers to progress.

They included forestry, education, science and technology, and tourism.

"In the short to medium term that pragmatic approach is likely to yield greater results than sitting still and waiting for a free-trade agreement to happen," Clark said.

She had decided to work with the private sector to make progress.

Koizumi said bilateral relations were important, but so were regional relations.

The question now was how to physically implement the hopes for those areas.

He wanted to expand relations between New Zealand and Japan, and did not think that the well-known differences between the two countries, including whaling, would impede progress.