08:33 Nov 20, 2005
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In its first four years, APEC met annually at the ministerial level -- in 1989 in Canberra, in 1990 in Singapore, in 1991 in Seoul, and in 1992 in Bangkok. At those meetings, the ministers set a sensible and balanced course of cooperation in a few practical areas like energy, fisheries, telecommunications, transport and tourism. Much stress was given to research and development, human resource development, and technology transfer. Trade liberalization was an APEC objective from the start, but it was dealt with only in the context of the Uruguay Round then going on.
In 1993, however, President Clinton came up with the idea of, in effect, elevating APEC's main annual gathering to a summit. He invited APEC leaders to a "retreat" right after the annual ministerial meeting being hosted by Seattle. At the retreat on Blake Island off Seattle, the leaders issued their "economic vision statement," a document that was both farseeing and balanced.
Since then, the host of every APEC ministerial meeting has felt compelled to invite the leaders to a similar retreat. Such retreats followed more or less the same format as Seattle, down to the clothing native to the host-country, the line of leaders waving or linking arms for the photo opportunity, and the reading of the declaration by the host leader in the company of the others.
The participation of leaders has considerably raised the public profile of APEC, as hordes of media people, who otherwise would not have been interested in APEC at all, stream to the APEC city in anticipation of some dramatic development of a domestic, bilateral or international nature. Indeed, a major side benefit of the APEC leaders' meeting is that it has provided a venue for top-level bilateral discussions or multilateral caucuses on the burning issues of the day, some of them having to do with trade, others of purely political import.
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