By Jalil Hamid
BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Pacific Rim nations vowed on Monday to press ahead with free trade and set the stage for a new global trade round despite a setback at WTO talks in Seattle last year.
Senior officials from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum said Asia's economic recovery had spurred them towards strengthening market opening in the 21-member grouping.
"The mood is one of optimism," Lim Jock Seng, permanent secretary at Brunei's Foreign Ministry, said at the end of a two-day meeting of APEC senior officials which he chaired.
"People are more confident. So in our discussions that mood of confidence, mood of wanting to move forward is there," Lim told a new conference.
"Of course, this is tinged with the idea that we must sustain whatever recovery we have. We want to continue that and ensure that the foundation for the sustained growth is there."
The meeting, the first of a series of talks in the run-up to the APEC summit meeting in Brunei in November, took stock of the aborted World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting in Seattle last December.
There had been hopes that APEC, whose members account for almost one half of world trade and $16 trillion of economic output, would provide the impetus for the WTO talks.
But WTO members failed to launch a new round in Seattle amid violent protests.
Under its so-called accelerated trade liberalisation programme, APEC aims to lift trade barriers across the Pacific Rim by 2020.
APEC officials said they were hopeful APEC trade ministers meeting in Darwin, Australia in June and the November summit would give a strong political push to WTO.
"We hope the Darwin meeting and the Brunei summit will send a strong political message that we at APEC want to discuss free trade," said a senior Indonesian delegate.
But he said APEC, which includes the United States and other rich nations, must also consider the interests of small member economies.
"It should also pay attention to other areas such as human resource development and small and medium scale industries. Otherwise, the gap between the rich and the poor will widen," he said.
APEC groups Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam.:
