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Top U.S. trade official hopes Asia-Pacific trade deal sent to Congress by year's end

Xinhua, July 2, 2015 Adjust font size:

A top U.S. trade official said Wednesday that he hoped to finalize a trade deal with 11 other countries in the Asia Pacific "in the near term" and send it to Congress for ratification before the end of this year.

"We're in the final stages of negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership," U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman said at an event organized by Politico, referring to a trade deal covering about 40 percent of global economy and nearing completion after more than five years of negotiations.

"We're down to a reasonable number of outstanding issues", but "by definition those issues tend to be the most difficult," Froman said, citing examples of market access issues and intellectual property rules.

"The first order of business" was to complete those negotiations and bring that agreement to Congress for approval by the end of the year, after getting trade promotion authority, also known as fast-track authority, from Congress last week, the U.S. trade official said.

Other TPP participants had signaled that they would like to put their best offers on the table and conclude the trade deal only after the Obama administration secured the fast-track authority from Congress, which would allow the president to submit trade deals to Congress for an up-or-down vote, not amendments.

The United States will have conversations with other TPP participants in the coming days and prepare for a chief negotiators meeting and a ministerial meeting to bring this deal to a close, Froman said, but declined to give a specific timetable.

Froman downplayed the differences between the U.S. and Japan over market access negotiations, which was crucial to the conclusion of the broader TPP negotiations, noting that the two sides had "made a very good progress in the last year and a half" despite of some outstanding issues.

Froman also said the U.S. will find the best way to achieve meaningful market access for U.S. exporters, not necessarily means cutting all tariffs to zero. "Our preferred way is tariff elimination but there are other ways to achieve that as well, tariff reduction, expansion of quotas, the improvement of quality and quantity of access," he said. Endite