JAKARTA, May 5 (Xinhua) — The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and European Union (EU) would cooperate to address trade barriers that have hampered trade of the two sides, Indonesia’s deputy trade minister said here on Thursday.
JAKARTA, May 5 (Xinhua) — The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and European Union (EU) would cooperate to address trade barriers that have hampered trade of the two sides, Indonesia’s deputy trade minister said here on Thursday.
The EU’s environmentally-friendly standard for imported products to the territory is one of the barriers which is different from the level of standard in ASEAN’s member countries.
Deputy Trade Minister of Indonesia Mahendra Siregar told a press conference on the sideline of EU-ASEAN Business Summit during the 18th ASEAN Summit in Jakarta that the two sides planned to change the approach to settle the difference in the future.
“In the past the approach was that if the exporters can meet the EU standard they may enter the EU market, if they can not meet (the standard), they can not enter the market. But now we change the approach, EU and us (ASEAN) want this difference can be settled through a cooperation that would bridge the difference. So it would bring benefit for both sides,” the deputy minister said.
EU’s standard of environmentally-friendly products of palm oil is one of the rules that has hampered Indonesia’s palm oil exports to EU so far despite Indonesia, the largest palm oil producers, has its own environmental standard.
“We want to settle the difference of the perspective in a constructive way, such as through cooperation that can make a standard based on similar calculation. So we do not consider it ( EU’s standard) discriminative,” said Mahendra.
ASEAN and EU trade volume reached 171.3 billion U.S. dollars with 93.0 billion U.S. dollars of ASEAN’s exports to EU in 2009, according to data from ASEAN secretariat. (Xinhua)
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