John Armstrong: A summit in search of an identity

Bilateral and regional free trade agreements have partly diluted the power of Apec. Photo / AP

Close to 300 new BMW limousines are polished and primed in readiness to ferry official delegations between meeting venues and hotels.

The traditional "silly costume" leaders' group photo will this year feature the presidents and prime ministers fitted out in Mandarin-collared linen shirts with lotus petal-shaped embroidery.

The end-of-meeting communique has already been drafted - and the draft already leaked to the media.

On the surface, it looks very much like being business as usual at this week's Apec summit in Singapore. Two decades on from its inception, however, the seemingly heavyweight economic and trade forum is suffering something of an identity crisis.

Sure, Apec, which draws 10,000 delegates, media and other visitors, still plays a crucial role in enabling countries to use a multilateral forum ostensibly devoted to economic matters as cover for discussing major political and security issues.

As a prime example of how Apec "gathers the right people in the right space", Trade Minister Tim Groser cites how the Auckland summit in 1999 enabled the United States and China to start mending fences following Nato's bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo War several months earlier.

However, despite membership which includes giant economies such as the United States, Japan and China, Apec's relevance is under question as it jostles for attention with other regional and global networks like Asean, the East Asia Summit and the G20 which are grabbing more of the limelight.

In contrast to those groupings, Apec has a credibility problem with political leaders too often having signed up to worthy objectives which they promptly ignore once back home.

Typically, the leaders annually pay homage to Apec's long-term goal of free and open trade and investment for industrialised economies by 2010 and for developing economies by 2020 - the so-called Bogor goals.

Trade barriers in the region have been cut substantially since the organisation was established in 1989. However, many members have short-circuited Apec's lumbering unilateral approach to trade liberalisation and stitched together preferential trade deals with one another. The result is a multiplicity of "noodle bowl"-like intertwining bilateral and regional trade agreements - some of which cut across Apec's goals.

The 2010 deadline now looms. But next year's stocktake on progress towards the Bogor goals is unlikely to reignite Apec's trade agenda because Japan will be the host and has opposed such unilateral pushes for free trade.