Commentary: Asia-Pacific needs more inclusive trade pact

Common sense teaches that brisk free trade activities can help incubate economic prosperity and higher living standards with low costs.

Despite being the world's most economically buoyant region, the Asia-Pacific is facing the exceptionally arduous task of helping the gloomy global economy return to sustainable growth.

As leaders of the regional economies are gathering in the Peruvian capital of Lima for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting during the weekend, they need to tackle anti-trade isolationism and embrace a trade agreement that can truly brighten the region's economic future.

At the 2014 APEC meeting in Beijing, the 21 Pacific Rim economies endorsed a road map to promote and eventually establish the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP).

The FTAAP, an idea first proposed in 2006, stresses inclusiveness, seeks greater regional economic integration and could unleash enormous potential for fast economic growth and balanced wealth distribution.

These very principles and merits represent perhaps the best kind of trade arrangement that could actually bring a group of the world's most diversified economies together under the same set of trade and investment rules.

The all-inclusive trade pact would also reduce the fragmentation caused by many of the region's separate and non-inclusive free trade agreements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The TPP is in fact not about boosting free trade. It is the economic arm of the Obama administration's geopolitical strategy to make sure that Washington rules supreme in the region.

The exclusion of China, the world's second-largest economy and the top trading nation, from this pact has proved that the United States cares more about its rights to write rules for the world's most economically dynamic region than the real benefits the agreement could deliver to the other 11 negotiating parties Washington attempts to lure in.

Recently, outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama has decided, though unwillingly, to let his successor, President-elect Donald Trump, decide the fate of the TPP.

Trump's campaign rhetoric has suggested that the future leader in Washington would be no friend to free trade, while his lashing-out at the TPP bodes ill for the trade pact.

What is more alarming is that the incoming U.S. president may backtrack from other free trade deals in the area and beyond.

In exactly two months' time, Trump will be at the helm of the world's largest economy. Turning his trade-bashing campaign talks into actual policies could bash any hope that the Asia-Pacific will finally have its much-wanted free trade deal. Worse, it could drag his country and the wider world into deeper economic distress.

The billionaire-turned-politician needs to prove that derailing the global economy has not been one of the reasons why he ran for U.S. president.

Meanwhile, in the face of rising global anti-trade fervor, the Asia-Pacific members should refrain from further supporting isolationism and protectionism in any way. Embracing openness, not rejecting it, is perhaps the best way for them to navigate the existing economic predicament. Endi