New Zealand's role as APEC host is officially over, but not without a tinge of geopolitical drama as Jacinda Ardern hosted the final leaders' meeting
Great Power tensions peeked out from the surface of an otherwise smooth end to New Zealand’s hosting of APEC, as leaders agreed on an action plan to drive the organisation’s work for the next 20 years.
A year-long programme of events, forced fully online by Covid-19, concluded with a final meeting between the leaders of the 21 APEC economies to wrap up remaining work.
As has been the case throughout 2021, the pandemic response was front and centre, with the leaders’ declaration saying its evolving nature and new variants of the virus “will create ongoing uncertainty and an uneven economic recovery across the Asia-Pacific region”.
APEC members continued to support equitable access to Covid vaccines, therapeutics and other medical essentials, while vaccine manufacturing and supply needed to be expanded as a priority.
Ardern said APEC had demonstrated during the Covid response that trade was a force for good, having “rejected vaccine nationalism and lowered tariffs on vaccines”.
The broader health of the international trading system was also in the spotlight, with the leaders’ declaration saying APEC members would “intensify efforts to ensure goods continue to flow even under challenging circumstances”.
The leaders committed to working together “to shape a responsive, relevant and revitalised” World Trade Organisation through necessary reforms, with the 12th WTO ministerial conference set to take place at the end of the month.
Climate change also featured, with the leaders “acknowledg[ing] the need for urgent and concrete action to transition to a climate-resilient future global economy and appreciat[ing] net zero or carbon neutrality commitments in this regard”.
Fossil fuel subsidy standstill 'very important step'
A joint statement issued by APEC ministers earlier in the week included a commitment to “take forward discussions” for a voluntary pause on new fossil fuel subsidies.
While the wording falls short of a 2010 pledge by APEC leaders to rationalise and phase out such subsidies altogether, Ardern said the agreement still represented a significant step forward, given three of the four largest users of fossil fuel subsidies worldwide were within APEC.
“This is a very clear commitment that took quite some time and quite some negotiation to achieve.
“Now that would not have been the case were it not clear that APEC economies were committed to this decision, and actually it’s more than has been achieved in other institutions who have sought the same thing, so this is, I think, a very important step in addressing the billions that is wasted on fossil fuel subsidies when they should instead be spending that money on responding to climate change.”
Ardern said there was now a “central focus on climate policy and environmental sustainability” within the organisation, compared to her first APEC meeting in 2017 when she was among a small group of leaders raising the issue.
The main document signed off by leaders was the Aotearoa Plan of Action. The plan provides a more detailed implementation programme for last year’s Putrajaya Vision 2040, which set out a high-level vision for APEC’s work over the next 20 years.
US President Joe Biden, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin all took part in proceedings, with a glimmer of Great Power tensions on display as APEC looked to who would follow Thailand’s 2022 hosting.
While Ardern said she was “very pleased” that the US had offered to host the 2023 event, formal confirmation was conspicuously absent from the leaders’ declaration.
The Associated Press reported that Russia had refused to support the US hosting bid unless it agreed to remove Russian diplomats from a blacklist, or allowed them to enter the country for the forum – a demand resisted by the Americans.
However, Ardern said she was confident that APEC members would reach consensus on the US offer, and Peru’s offer to host the event in 2024, “in fairly short order”.
“It is not an issue that is substantively discussed at leader level as you can imagine, but it is something I have every confidence we’ll see resolved very shortly.”
While China reportedly stayed silent on the US offer, its own unease with Washington came to the fore earlier in the week.
In a speech to the APEC CEO Summit on Thursday, Xi warned against “relapsing into the confrontation and division of the Cold War era”, in what was widely seen as a critique of the Aukus alliance and other efforts to counter Chinese influence in the region.
Ardern described the mood of the meeting as “positive and constructive”, and said geopolitical tensions were not at the forefront of discussions.
"There was a need for us to make progress on really key fundamental issues which APEC hadn't put, perhaps in the past, as much of a stake in the ground and we're in the middle of one of the biggest health and economic crises of a generation - APEC leaders were front and centre of that."
The nature of APEC is it...by tradition has a very strong focus on economic resilience and obviously economic cooperation so that’s where leaders tend to very much focus when we come together – with the added, of course, focus on the health-based response.”
While China and Taiwan had both been expected to use the occasion to press their case for joining the CPTPP trade deal, Ardern said the pact had come up as “a reference point” rather than in any substantive way.
Reflecting on New Zealand’s host year, Ardern said it had been a significant undertaking given the need to put APEC on a surer footing after disruptions to the previous three host years.
"There was a need for us to make progress on really key fundamental issues which APEC hadn't put, perhaps in the past, as much of a stake in the ground and we're in the middle of one of the biggest health and economic crises of a generation - APEC leaders were front and centre of that…
“This is just the culmination of months of work by many, many exceptional people, and I take the opportunity to put on record my thanks to them – they’ve done New Zealand absolutely proud.”
