The TPP Ministerial Meeting was held in Singapore from 7th-10th December 2013. The aim of the Ministerial Meeting was to take stock of the progress made in the negotiations since the Bali Leaders Meeting in October 2013 and to provide guidance on appropriate compromises to enable negotiators to overcome the remaining outstanding issues in the various Chapters. Leaders in Bali decided to conclude the TPP negotiations by year end. This has been proven to be impossible to achieve.

The next ministerial meeting for Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade negotiations will likely be postponed to February 2014 from the initially planned January, informed sources said.

Since 2010, the United States has been negotiating a secret trade deal, the Trans Pacific Partnership. If approved by Congress, this pact between the U.S. and 11 or 12 of America's Pacific Rim trade-partners would govern 40 percent of U.S. imports and exports.

The Dec. 10 adjournment of minister-level talks in Singapore on the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade scheme means that the negotiations will not conclude by the yearend deadline set by leaders of the 12 participating countries at their October meeting in Bali. Although Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is eager to conclude the TPP talks as soon as possible, an early conclusion should not become Japan’s goal. There is the risk that trying to hurry a deal will result in sacrificing important national interests.

Negotiators had hoped to finalise what could be the world's biggest free trade agreement by the end of 2013. But a number of issues remain and talks on the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement will resume in 2014. And in Australia, at least, there have been growing calls for the talks to be more transparent, with fears the agreement could have some negative implications. Ildi Amon reports. Negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement involve 12 countries which account for up to 40 per cent of the world's GDP.

Speaking at the conference on TPP negotiations in HCMC last Friday, Tran Quoc Khanh, head of the Vietnamese TPP negotiation delegation and Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade, said that the team is trying to conclude the agreement as soon as possible. However, negotiators from participating countries agreed that no agreement is still better than a bad agreement. They will not sacrifice quality of the TPP agreement due to time pressure, Khanh said.

TOKYO, Dec. 12 (Xinhua) -- Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday called for a senior minister of his Cabinet to speed up talks on the sluggish Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade deal and insisted an agreement be found at an early juncture.

As participating countries failed to reconcile a variety of conflicts, including one between Japan and the United States, an accord on creating a new free trade zone in Asia and the Pacific region has been postponed till next year. A rough road lies ahead for the negotiations.

(Reuters) - An ambitious trade pact between a dozen countries around the Pacific Rim will not be finalized this year as hoped, with no agreement on thorny issues like intellectual property, agricultural tariffs and state-owned enterprises. The U.S.-backed deal, which Washington wanted to conclude this year, aims to establish a free-trade bloc stretching from Vietnam to Chile andJapan, encompassing about 800 million people and almost 40 percent of the global economy. But differences over farm tariffs between the United States and Japan proved to be one of the major roadblocks.

Japan and the United States on Monday continued their bilateral talks to solve remaining issues on the fringes of a multilateral Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade meeting being held in Singapore, after the two failed to bridge gaps the day before. In their meeting held Monday morning, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman and Japanese Senior Vice Minister of the Cabinet Office Yasutoshi Nishimura likely made new efforts to meet halfway over tariffs Tokyo seeks to retain on farm products, as well as auto trade, an area in which Washington wants more concessions from Japan.