ROXAS TO DTI: SET-UP 'VIRTUAL' TRADE REPRESENTATIVE OFFICE
JPEPA EXPERIENCE 'PAINFUL' AS EVEN BASIC FACTS WERE NOT AVAILABLE

Senator Mar Roxas advised the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to already set-up a "virtual" Philippine Trade Representative Office (PTRO) to strengthen the country's infrastructure in dealing with foreign trade and economic agreements.

The senator made this statement on Thursday during deliberations on the DTI budget, and in light of his pending bill creating the said trade office. Roxas requested Senator Edgardo Angara, the sponsor of the DTI's budget, to instruct the DTI to undertake such organizational restructuring and clearly set forth funding and budgetary realignments necessary to create a "virtual" PTRO short of new legislation.

"I believe it is incumbent on the DTI to restructure a portion of its organization so that it can organizationally support this very important undertaking, in terms of resources and personnel. Every agreement, every provision of any trade agreement that we enter should have a positive impact all across our country," he added.

Roxas said that while DTI has an international trade group already, there is a need to have an office whose full-time task is to understand and negotiate international trade agreements. He noted, for instance, that the United States has created a Cabinet-level position, the US Trade Representative, solely to focus on international trade agreements and harmonize all disparate trade concerns of the US economy.

He also said the experience in the Senate hearings on the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA) were "very painful" because even the most basic questions on the agreement's benefits and threats could not be readily answered. JPEPA is the first major bilateral trade treaty the Philippines may enter.

"The facts that should have been readily available were available only after much effort," he said, noting that in the seven hearings held by the Senate so far on the agreement, the basic facts were only becoming clear recently.

"With this, fundamental questions come to mind: what facts, what negotiating philosophy, what strategic direction did the negotiators have when they sat across their Japanese counterparts? And there would be many more agreements that we will all be negotiating and entering into," he stressed.

He noted that the Philippines is now in talks with US, Korea, New Zealand and Australia, among others. He also said the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is starting to ink such deals, as a bloc, with other countries.

In the 14th Congress, Roxas re-filed Senate Bill No. 252 seeking the creation of the PTRO.