A face-to-face meeting of trade ministers from Japan and the United States “failed to reach a much-awaited breakthrough, seen as vital to advancing the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, at a three-day meeting on the proposed trade accord that wrapped in Sydney on Monday,” says Kyodo news agency. Agriculture and automobiles are the sticking points for two major powers among the 12 nations in TPP. Japan resists U.S. calls for wider access to rice, sugar, dairy, wheat, and beef and pork markets. Tokyo wants safeguards against an import surge of U.S. goods.
“The problems left are extremely difficult and we cannot solve them easily,” Japan’s TPP minister Akiri Amari said, according to Kyodo. He said the finish line for the bilateral talks was not in sight and the two nations would try again although a date has not been set. The White House hopes for a broad agreement on TPP by next month.
While the U.S. and Japanese talks did not pay off, trade ministers meeting in Sydney said in a joint statement that made significant progress on tariffs and unified trade rules, said Kyodo. The TPP countries – Australia, the United States, Japan, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, Mexico, Vietnam, Peru, Chile, Brunei and New Zealand – jointly account for almost 40 per cent of the global economy.