HONOLULU (Reuters) – Asia Pacific trade ministers on Friday said they were unable to agree on the terms of an initiative pushed by the United States to boost trade in clean energy and other environmentally friendly technologies.

“We advanced work to promote liberalization in trade and investment in environmental goods and services, and submitted the issue to APEC Leaders’ to consider how best to take this work forward,” the trade ministers said in a joint statement after a day of talks.

The United States is pushing the 21 members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum to agree on a plan to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming by capping tariffs on environmental goods at 5 percent.

It also wants members to pledge to reduce regulatory and other non-tariff barriers that thwart trade in the sector.

“Ministers had robust discussions and made progress today. But given the importance of the issue and its relevance to confronting today’s challenges, leaders want to have an opportunity to discuss it,” a U.S. official said.

China has complained the U.S. plan is too ambitious for developing countries, which generally have higher tariffs on environmental goods than the United States.

It also warned that a U.S. decision this week to investigate whether to slap duties on solar cells and modules from China could hurt cooperation on energy issues.

HONOLULU (Reuters) – The United States on Friday welcomed Japan’s interest in joining talks on a pan-Pacific free trade pact but said Tokyo first must show skeptics it can meet the high standards for open markets.

Japan’s move marks a major breakthrough for the U.S.-led talks. The Obama administration wants to make the Trans Pacific Partnership a template for quality trade deals and a counterweight to China’s presence in the region.

“In close consultations with Congress and our domestic stakeholders, we look forward to engaging with the Japanese in these discussions,” U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said after Japanese Prime Yoshihiko Noda announced his country was ready to join the TPP.

“To join the negotiations, Japan must be prepared to meet the TPP’s high standards for liberalizing trade and to address specific issues of concern to the United States regarding barriers to agriculture, services and manufacturing trade, including nontariff barriers,” Kirk said.

Japan’s Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yukio Edano said Noda’s announcement “was made with full understanding of the terms involved and we will make our decision on whether to join the talks based on this understanding and a study of agreements reached by the nine countries.”

Japan’s bid to join the TPP faces considerable political challenges in the United States.

Ford Motor Co said it opposed the move and Democratic and Republican lawmakers demanded assurances that Japan will make deep structural changes to open the world’s third-largest economy to foreign competition.

HONOLULU (Reuters) – Japan’s readiness to join Asia-Pacific free trade talks gave momentum on Friday to global efforts to reinvigorate trade ties and boosted President Barack Obama’s drive for U.S. leadership in the world’s most economically dynamic region.

The Obama administration is seeking to reset relations with Pacific nations and offer a counterweight to China’s growing power at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ summit this weekend in Honolulu.

“We obviously believe that the world’s strategic and economic center of gravity will be the Asia-Pacific for the 21st century and it will be up to American statecraft over the next decade to lock in a substantially increased investment — diplomatic, economic, strategic and otherwise,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said after meeting APEC ministers.

Obama arrives later on Friday at the annual gathering of APEC’s 21 members, which account for more than half of the world’s output, where he will meet with leaders of China, Japan and Russia.

With Europe’s debt crisis sending shock waves around the globe, this year’s APEC meeting is also shaping up as a forum to press the euro zone to sort out its problems and for APEC countries to bolster defenses against the fallout.

“The stakes are high for all of us,” Clinton said earlier.

Fostering free trade is one of the few steps that leaders can take to spur global growth when fiscal and monetary measures are virtually exhausted in many developed countries. Pushing ahead with regional trade pacts has gained importance now the Doha round of global talks have ground to a halt.

HONOLULU, Nov 11 (Reuters) – Japan’s readiness to join Asia-Pacific free trade talks gave a major boost on Friday to President Barack Obama’s drive to assert U.S. leadership in the world’s most dynamic region and promote growth at home.

Obama arrives in Honolulu, the city of his birth, later on Friday for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, seeking to reset his relations with Pacific nations and offer a counterweight to China’s growing power.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set the tone for APEC’s 21 member countries, which account for more than half of global economic output.

“We are each trying to generate balanced, inclusive and sustainable growth that delivers good jobs for our citizens, economic, social, and environmental progress for our nations and shared prosperity for this region,” she said in her opening remarks at the ministerial meetings.

U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk welcomed Japan’s request to join the U.S.-led talks for a Trans-Pacific Partnership among nine countries in the Pacific Rim, saying it affirmed efforts to set a benchmark for quality free trade deals.

“Japan’s interest in the TPP demonstrates the economic and strategic importance of this initiative to the region,” Kirk said.

But Japan must be prepared to meet the high standards of liberalized trade the talks are striving for by reducing barriers to agriculture, services and manufacturing, he said.

HONOLULU, Nov 11 (Reuters) – The United States on Friday welcomed Japan’s request to join talks on an Asia-Pacific regional free trade pact but said Tokyo first must show skeptics it can meet the high standards for open markets.

Japan’s request marks a major breakthrough for the U.S.-led talks, which the Obama administration views as a benchmark for quality free trade deals in the 21st century and a counterweight to China’s presence in the region.

“In close consultations with Congress and our domestic stakeholders, we look forward to engaging with the Japanese in these discussions,” U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk said after Japanese Prime Yoshihiko Noda announced his country was ready to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“To join the negotiations, Japan must be prepared to meet the TPP’s high standards for liberalizing trade and to address specific issues of concern to the United States regarding barriers to agriculture, services and manufacturing trade, including non-tariff barriers,” Kirk said.

“Japan’s interest in the TPP demonstrates the economic and strategic importance of this initiative to the region.”

The United States and the eight other members of the TPP have already held eight rounds of talks and have scheduled five more with an informal goal of finishing next year. Obama and other leaders of the TPP countries will meet on Saturday to discuss the status of the talks and Japan’s request to join.

Japan, the world’s third-largest economy and the fourth-largest U.S. trading partner, has been considering joining the TPP talks for over a year, but it faced stiff opposition from its farmers, who benefit from Japan’s protected agricultural sector. Noda’s decision raised both hopes and fears that he is serious about economic reforms that will reinvigorate an economy virtually stalled for two decades.

HONOLULU (Reuters) – Asia Pacific business groups urged President Barack Obama and eight other regional leaders to set a goal of mid-2012 for concluding a Pacific free trade agreement.

The groups also said they would welcome Japan’s joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) talks provided it is willing to quickly tackle long-standing barriers to its markets and did not drag out the talks.

“We view the TPP as a once-in-a-generation venture that provides the opportunity to advance the interest of workers and enterprises in nine key countries,” Cal Cohen, president of the Emergency Committee for American Trade, told reporters.

“It can also serve as a foundation for a free-trade agreement of the entire Asia Pacific,” he said at a news conference to release a statement from ten business groups.

The United States is hoping to make progress on the TPP talks at the APEC summit in Honolulu this week, heralding it as a template for high-quality agreements on free trade

The nine TPP countries — United States, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Chile and Peru — are also members of the 21-member Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, meeting this week in Hawaii.

Trade ministers from the TPP countries are meeting on Thursday, which is expected to set the stage for leaders to announce on Saturday the broad outlines of deal and that they are well on the way to finishing the talks.

HONOLULU (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama on Thursday hailed the clearing of Russia’s path to join the World Trade Organization, and said he would work with Congress to end Cold War-era trade restrictions and give Moscow normal trade status.

In a statement, Obama cast Russia’s joining of the WTO next month as a boost both for his “reset” policy for U.S.-Russia ties and for exports that will create U.S. jobs. The latter is a key goal for Obama, who faces a tough re-election bid with a struggling economy and unemployment hovering around 9 percent.

“Russia’s membership in the WTO will generate more exports for American manufacturers and farmers, which in turn will support well-paying jobs in the United States,” Obama said in a statement in Washington.

“I now look forward to working with Congress” to end legislative restrictions on trade with Russia to put U.S. companies on an even playing field with international competitors, he said.

He was reacting to a deal reached earlier on Thursday in Geneva that paves the way for global trade ministers to approve Russia’s entry into the WTO at a ministerial meeting in December, concluding 18 years of negotiations.

The deal, which appears to be a significant advance for global free trade, came as officials of the 21-economy Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum were meeting in Honolulu in talks that focused on expanding trade to stimulate global economic growth. Obama joins the meetings this weekend.

Russia’s entry would obligate the United States to establish permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) by lifting a Cold War-era provision known as the Jackson-Vanik amendment.

HONOLULU (Reuters) – Europe’s debt crisis will take a bite out of U.S. exports but the fast-growing Asia-Pacific region could make up the gap, U.S. Commerce Secretary John Bryson said on Thursday.

“We’ve had such strong exports to Europe and now with the European financial crisis those will come down, appear to be coming down” Bryson told Reuters in an interview.

“There’s not reason to think we can improve meaningfully in Europe,” but markets such as China, Malaysia, South Korea and others in the Asia Pacific region offer more promise, he said in the sidelines of the APEC summit here.

Trade data released on Thursday showed U.S. exports reached a record $180.4 billion in September despite European turmoil.

“These are quite exciting numbers,” Bryson said, noting that exports for the first nine months of 2011 are up 16 percent over the same period last year. That’s roughly the pace needed to meet President Barack Obama’s goal of doubling U.S. exports by the end of 2014.

A new pilot program the Commerce Department is launching with FedEx Corp should help U.S. exports continue to grow, Bryson said.

It will match U.S. suppliers with FedEx customers in targeted export markets that currently are not buying from the United States. The program also will help FedEx by stimulating more shipments from Asia to the United States.

HONOLULU (Reuters) – Australia wants World Trade Organization members to recognize that reaching a comprehensive deal in decade-old world trade talks has become impossible and to focus instead on a series of smaller pacts, the country’s top trade official said on Wednesday.

“We have come to the view that the Doha round can’t be completed in one big lot,” Australian Trade Minister Craig Emerson said on the sidelines of this week’s meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.

Australia is proposing that nations agree at next month’s WTO ministerial meeting in Geneva to split the negotiations covering manufactured goods, services and agriculture and several other matters into “their component parts and delivering them as they are ready to be delivered, rather than making them all conditional upon each other,” Emerson said.

He argued reviving and eventually reaching a deal in the Doha round was the best thing countries could do to restore global economic growth.

“We’ve pretty well given the fiscal stimuluses a good old work out and monetary easing a good old work out,” he said.

“It’s our firm conviction that when we’re seeking to achieve a global economic recovery, the best way to do that is to open our economies up to trade.”

The Doha round was launched 10 years ago with the goal of helping poor countries prosper through trade. However, bitter divisions over how much developed countries should cut farm tariffs and subsidies in exchange for developing countries opening their markets have prevented a deal.

HONOLULU (Reuters) – Asia-Pacific finance ministers, increasingly alarmed by Europe’s failure to stem its debt crisis, will seek to forge a united front Thursday and call for more decisive action as they shore up their own economies against the fallout.

Talks paving the way for a weekend summit of the Pacific Rim — one of the world’s fastest-growing regions — are expected to be overshadowed by Europe’s escalating debt troubles that are sending shockwaves across the globe.

The annual gathering of the 21-member APEC — hosted this year by U.S. President Barack Obama in his native Hawaii — was being billed as an effort to make progress on building a new free-trade area and advancing a “green” technology pact, steps that could foster global growth.

But a summit agenda that promises trade benefits that could take years to materialize will offer small comfort to global markets, reeling over the crisis in the euro zone, where Italy has overtaken Greece as the prime threat to stability.

Senior officials laying the groundwork for talks among APEC finance and foreign ministers Thursday and a leaders’ summit Saturday expressed growing concern about Europe’s debt woes and agreed on the need to strengthen their economies against the potential spillover, a U.S. Treasury official said.

Finance ministers from the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation group are also expected to keep pressure on China over its currency, the official said, signaling acquiescence to a U.S. push for appreciation of the yuan.

The issue has been a major source of tension between Washington and Beijing, which has become increasingly assertive in the region.