Reducing the fear of embargoes would make it easier for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation member countries and economies to lower barriers to free trade in food goods, said Sir Dryden Spring, a delegate at the APEC Business Advisory Council meeting in Singapore.

“There are more restrictions on trade in food products than on anything else,” Spring Said. “We are going to be calling on the leaders to renounce the use of embargoes on the export of food as a political weapon.”

Countries are reluctant to free up food trade because they fear they will become dependent on imported goods, which could later be cut off by exporting countries “for political reasons,” he said.

Spring said the council, which advises APEC political leaders from a private-sector perspective, will call for an end to food embargoes and make other recommendations

when leaders from the 21 APEC countries and economies meet in Shanghai in October.

APEC, formed in 1989, aims to establish free trade between its developed members by 2010. developing economies will be given until 2020.

Along with the call to end food embargoes, the council will also recommend that more be done to help APEC members’ financial systems deal with the increasing volume and speed of cross-border capital flows—often cited as a factor in the 1997-98 financial crisis.

Another major goal of the council to convince APEC leaders to promote Internet technology and to address the lack of computer training and availability in less developed economies, said Paul Song, chairman of the council’s technology task force.

APEC members are Australia, Brunei, Canada, China, Chile, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, the US and Vietnam.

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