European Union and Japanese executives Monday pressed for a new urgency in World Trade Organisation talks on global trade while urging their own governments to promote two-way investment.
Forty-nine executives from major companies such as Toyota Motor and Bertelsmann AG called on their governments to work to reach a basic agreement by a July deadline set by the WTO.
"We think it's very important to return to the right track after Cancun," said Viscount Etienne Davignon, vice chairman of Belgian-based energy firm Suez-Tractebel, who co-chaired the two-day EU-Japan Business Dialogue Round Table.
"If we can't do this in July it means that there will be nothing very significant happening before the first months of 2005 because of (the November presidential) elections in the United States," he said.
"We cannot live in a vacuum in between Cancun and the first months of 2005."
The 148-member WTO talks on what is known as the Doha agenda collapsed in the Mexican city of Cancun in September due mainly to differences over farm trade and investment access but representatives from nearly 30 WTO countries met in Paris last month to work toward a basic agreement by July.
Besides trade issues, the executives attending the sixth annual Round Table also called on their governments to boost two-way investment.
"With the recovery of the Japanese economy and with the enlargement of the European Union, this is very important," Davignon said.
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, European Commission President Romano Prodi and Irish premier Bertie Ahern, who currently holds the rotating EU presidency, are expected to agree on an investment promotion framework at the end of the Japan-EU summit on Tuesday.
The Japan-EU summit is the first since the May enlargement of the Union to 25 nations from 15 and comes as Japan's economic growth in the January-March quarter of 6.1 percent annualized led the top seven industrialized nations.
Ambassador Bernhard Zepter, head of the European Commission delegation in Japan, has encouraged Japanese firms to invest in the economies of the bloc's new East European members and so benefit from the 21.7 billion euros (26.3 billion dollars) in EU funds set aside in 2003-06 for them.Agence France Presse:
