Apec’s quiet cooperation still matters in a noisy, divided world

If anyone anywhere this week spares a thought for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, it will almost certainly be linked to the Apec leaders’ meeting set for Shenzhen in November.

But this is to miss the massive value and purpose of the 21-member grouping inaugurated in Canberra in 1989. To witness Apec’s unique and distinguishing value, you should have been in Guangzhou this week, where over 1,000 have gathered without pomp or fanfare for the first senior officials’ meeting (SOM1).

I was first sent by the Apec Business Advisory Council (ABAC) to find out more about the senior officials’ meeting in 2011 during a year of US chairmanship. I had expected the sort of thing that starts after coffee in the morning, gathers 50 or so people around a large rectangular table and finishes with a jovial gala dinner.

What I lumbered into at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Centre in Washington was a mind-boggling three-dimensional labyrinth of over 80 meetings straddling three weeks without a break for weekends. This was international cooperation on steroids, the awesome “engine room” of trade and economic cooperation spanning economies from Russia to Canada, the United States, Mexico, Peru and Chile.

Over three weeks, I scrambled between four and five meetings a day, ranging from health, transport, telecoms, tourism, energy and emergency preparedness to intellectual property and the automotive dialogue; from illegal logging and ocean fisheries to science and technology and regulatory reform; from services and market access to small and medium-sized enterprises and women in the economy. The Business Mobility Group was tweaking the now-treasured Apec business travel card.

For the past three decades, thousands of unassuming technocrats have gathered at least three times a year at senior official meetings to oil the wheels of economic cooperation in the Asia-Pacific. They provide living proof of the indispensable value of expert discussion and collaboration.