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World Trade Organization members including Singapore and the UAE are preparing to unveil a new grouping to boost “trade openness” as small and medium-sized nations bolster their own trading links in the era of US President Donald Trump.
The new grouping, to be called the Future of Investment and Trade Partnership, or “FIT-P”, is expected to include about 10 countries, with New Zealand joining Singapore and the UAE as core founding members.
Other potential members include Morocco, Rwanda, Malaysia, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay and Norway, according to diplomats and officials from Asia, Latin America and Australasia involved in developing the plans.
A final list for the initiative, which will focus on “rules-based” international trade, has not been confirmed.
The FIT-P grouping, which plans to focus on delivering confidence-building measures on areas such as digital trade, is to be launched at a virtual meeting in November, followed by an in-person event pencilled in for July 2026, officials have said.
“The idea, at the start, is to keep it as a loose coalition to bolster trade openness and international trade rules, but it may evolve into something bigger over time. It is a work in progress,” said one of those involved in discussions.
Among the areas of focus will be encouraging members to give equal treatment to paper and digital-based trade documents, viewed as crucial to increasing efficiency in trade. Some countries still do not accept digital documents.
The new scheme, which a second diplomat said would be announced formally next month, emerged as the Trump administration undermines the global consensus on trade, striking a series of quick-fire bilateral trade deals designed to shrink US trade deficits.
The so-called napkin deals with the EU, Japan and other big US trade partners have roiled supply chains and called into question the viability of the “most favoured nation” principle of treating all trade partners equally.
The pressure to defend the rules-based global trade system has already led the EU and the 12-member Indo-Pacific CPTPP trade bloc to announce plans to deepen their own ties.
Cecilia Malmström, a former EU trade commissioner now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who has pressed for stronger EU-CPTPP co-operation, said the new scheme could be complementary to the wider efforts to stabilise global trading systems.
“It shows that many countries want to trade within clear rules and transparency. This group could co-operate with EU-CPTPP and together push for plurilateral global rules,” she said.
Officials involved in the FIT-P grouping said it was deliberately aimed at smaller countries, with a view to creating a nimbler forum that could develop common understandings on areas such as digital documents, accepting e-signatures and rules on electronic trade.
One cited the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA), founded in 2020 by Chile, New Zealand and Singapore to create a framework for the new digital economy, and subsequently joined by South Korea last year, as a model for the scheme.
Not all those countries touted as potential members of FIT-P said they had made a final decision on whether to join. Some were awaiting more details of precisely what it would deliver.
“There are plenty of other trade groups around — we wouldn’t want to join another just for the sake of it. We want more details on the benefits and mechanisms of it, otherwise it could just be death by a thousand meetings,” added an official from one country that has been approached.
The New Zealand and Singapore ministries of trade declined to comment on the plans.
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