During 2009, the Asian - Pacific economies witnessed the collapse of trade unprecedented in modern economic history. This collapse has been combined with contractions in production and rising unemployment in almost all economies. In their efforts to address these serious challenges, policymakers in many countries opted to use trade restrictions, often but not always, in line with the flexibility left by the multilateral trading rules on the use of contingent measures.

This reference material is a compilation of work associated with tracking and analyzing regional trade flows and regionalism processes. This work has been pursued by the Trade Policy Section of the Trade and Investment Division within the mandate given by ESCAP member States. It provides comprehensive explanations of most of the indicators featured in the Asia-Pacific Trade and Investment Agreements Database (APTIAD).

Regional economic integration has been an important trend of the 1990s, led by the concept of a single European market created by the European Union in 1992 and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. These Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) pursued a deeper type of integration covering preferential free trading arrangements complemented by investment liberalization across the region. The level of economic integration was progressively deepened, and coverage of RTAs expanded over time.

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, the aim is to clarify the motivation for, and objective of the ARTNeT regional study on agriculture trade liberalization, and to lay out the plan of this publication. The second aim is to paint, with a rather broad brush, a picture of preferential trade in the region as a backdrop for a regionally more narrow analysis of preferential trade focused on agriculture goods.

The 147 member governments of WTO agreed on 1 August 2004 to commence negotiations on trade facilitation. This decision followed a heated and protracted debate on trade facilitation among WTO member countries that started after the Singapore Ministerial Meeting in 1996 and contributed, together with three other so-called Singapore issues , to the failure of the WTO Ministerial Meeting in Cancun in 2003.

The first meeting of the Negotiating Group on Trade Facilitation (NGTF) held in November 2004 highlighted the necessity of identifying trade facilitation needs and priorities of developing countries (DCs) and least developed countries (LDCs), along with the need to address the concerns of DCs/LDCs related to cost implications of proposed measures and in terms of special and differential treatment.