The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) is slated to be signed on March 8, 2018 in Chile after a breakthrough in which all member countries agreed on four country-specific issues, including Malaysia’s interests.

In a statement today, International Trade and Industry Minister Mustapa Mohamed, said the date, however, would have to be formally confirmed by the CPTPP ministers.

“The CPTPP would benefit the country in terms of expanding consumer choices on goods and services in our market,” he said.

Mustapa said Malaysia expected additional jobs to be created as a result of further investment that would come in due to the improved trading and investment environment under the CPTPP.

“We are satisfied with the outcome of this meeting and our negotiators have once again successfully defended Malaysia’s interests,” he said.

The trade minister said he would table the outcome of this meeting to cabinet for its consideration and resume the engagement process with the relevant stakeholders should the cabinet decided to grant its approval.

To recap, chief negotiators of the 11 CPTPP member countries met in Tokyo for two days starting Jan 22, 2018 as a follow up from the ministerial meeting that was held in Da Nang, Vietnam on Nov 10, 2017.

The Tokyo meeting has achieved a breakthrough in which all member countries have come to an agreement on these four country-specific issues, namely, state-owned enterprises – namely on Malaysia’s request for additional flexibility to conduct preferential purchases for the upstream oil and gas sector, in which the commitment to limit the transition period would now commence on the date of entry into force, instead of the date of signing as per the previous arrangement.

Others were on market access for the coal industry, trade sanctions related to dispute settlement, and exceptions to cultural industries.

“These issues were supposed to have been resolved much later,” said Mustapa.

He said before the Tokyo meeting, there were 20 provisions that would be suspended under the CPTPP. The suspension would mean that these provisions will not be implemented for the time being, until all CPTPP member countries agreed to uplift this suspension.

“The Tokyo meeting has agreed to add two more suspensions into the list – making it a total of 22 suspensions. One of them was on the additional flexibilities for Malaysia in the oil and gas sector as described above – after the relentless pursuit and consistent fight put forth by our negotiating team on this matter. Another one was on the market access for Brunei’s coal industry,” he said.

The English text of the agreement has been finalised and it will be released upon the completion and verification of the same text in French and Spanish, expected within the next few weeks.

- Bernama