|
A customer picks up bananas at a fruit market in Jakarta, capital of Indonesia, on Jan. 1, 2010. China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on Friday kicked off the world's largest free trade area (FTA) embracing developing countries. The China-ASEAN FTA covers a population of 1.9 billion and involves about 4.5 trillion U.S. dollars of trade volume. (Xinhua/Yue Yuewei)
???NANNING, Jan. 1 (Xinhua) -- China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) kicked off their free trade area (FTA) on Friday.
The world's largest FTA embracing developing countries covers a population of 1.9 billion and involves about 4.5 trillion U.S. dollars of trade volume.
The average tariff on goods from ASEAN countries to China is cut down to 0.1 percent from 9.8 percent.
The six original ASEAN members, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand, will slash the average tariff on Chinese goods from 12.8 percent to 0.6 percent. By 2015,the policy of zero-tariff rate for 90 percent of Chinese goods is expected to extend to the four new ASEAN members, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.
Dozens of trucks, mostly carrying dragon fruit from Vietnam, thronged border markets Friday morning, waiting to be unloaded at the Tianyuan Fruit Trade Market, one of China's largest market for fruit import, at the Pingxiang Port in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
"The establishment of the free trade area is really good news for me," said Liu Yuzhen at the Tianyuan market, who has been trading fruits for 16 years.
She now sells more than 10 tonnes of apples, pears, oranges and other fruits to southeast Asia every day, and hopes her business will expand as the FTA will facilitate the customs clearance and reduce the logistics cost.
Gu Xiaosong, vice president of the Guangxi Academy of Social Sciences, said both ASEAN members and southern China provinces abound with tropical primary products like rubber and tropical fruits, and thus competition in the earlier stage of the FTA will be unavoidable.
"But such competition will eventually lead to optimization of the agricultural and industrial structures in the region, which will help form a more competitive entity in the global market," he said.
There is a provision in the FTA for a temporary delay in tariff reduction by reclassifying goods as "sensitive" and "highly sensitive" products.
| 
