The 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has resumed free-trade talks with India. “Now today we have agreed to resume the negotiations as soon as possible, with Malaysia leading the way, and we hope that it can be completed expeditiously,” Malaysian trade minister Rafidah Aziz told a joint news conference with Indian commerce minister Kamal Nath. The talks had stalled after ASEAN said India had wanted too many goods to be excluded from the proposed agreement. The ministers said they had not set a deadline for the completion of the talks, which have stalled several times already. Rafidah said India had agreed to reduce a list of 560 products it earlier wanted left out of the pact, but ASEAN was not happy with the target dates — some as distant as 2022 — it had proposed on some of the concessions offered. “We cannot say that we are satisfied, because we have just decided we can go back to the negotiating table,” Ong Keng Yong, ASEAN’s secretary-general, told reporters. Kamal Nath, who engaged in vigorous mock sparring with Rafidah throughout the news conference, said “India has its sensitivities, just as ASEAN has its sensitivities”.ASEAN, which encompasses more than 550 million people and has a combined economy larger than India’s, has said in the past it wants the list of excluded items to fall to 400. The trade talks initially ran aground after India asked for 1,414 items to be excluded from the pact, including rice, textiles, palm oil, coconut oil and petroleum products.
