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.

Abe told Yasutoshi Nishimura, senior vice minister of the Cabinet Office, to stick to a previous commitment made with the other 11 TPP-member nations to finalize a deal by the year-end deadline.

Nishimura, who was deputizing for Akira Amari, the minister in charge of the TPP negotiations, who was recently diagnosed with tongue cancer, at the latest four-day TPP ministerial meeting through Tuesday in Singapore, failed to reach a consensus with other TPP-member nations, with analysts intimating that Nishimura' s junior status compared to Amari's, may have been a factor in the stalled process in Singapore.

Nishimura told Abe that while there still remained some issues to be resolved, a general consensus is in sight, but with the fundamental premise of the TPP deal being the lifting of all tariffs among member nations, analysts have pointed to a logjam between Japan and the United States as delaying the process reaching a conclusion by the year-end, with negotiations possibly spilling over into 2014.

Japan and the United States continue to be embroiled in a stalemate over Japan's sensitive agricultural sector, as well as on matters of intellectual property and the automotive sector, with Amari remarking recently that there is virtually zero possibility that Japan will roll over on its sensitive farm tariffs, despite calls from most of the 11 other TPP-member countries for it to do so.

Japan has, since it entered the TPP talks, sought to protect its fragile rice industry, which sees tariffs of more than 700 percent imposed on foreign imports to protect the age-old sector.

Along with its rice industry, Japan has also been looking to safeguard its wheat, beef, pork, dairy products and sugar industries, which has, previously, drawn the ire of other TPP- member countries and led to ongoing and protracted negotiations.

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman was quoted by local media as saying recently that not enough progress had been made by Japan and that Tokyo had failed to live up to the "high ambition" of the TPP, as outlined in the 2011 Honolulu Declaration at which U.S. President Barack Obama and other leaders pledged a complete elimination of tariffs and flexibility on the matter from all member countries going forward.

Froman said that he is still hopeful that Japan will stick to the original fundamentals of the TPP framework and that the U.S. and Japan ironing out their differences would be crucial for the process to continue moving forward.

But while Nishimura has stated that Japan will do its utmost to conform to the high-level agreement, he remarked to reporters in Tokyo upon returning to Japan, that Tokyo will not budge "one millimeter" to make concessions on its "sacred sectors" and called on the United States for more flexibility.

Abe told Nishimura Thursday, however, that it is of great importance for Japan to cooperate with the U.S. on reaching a deal and said that negotiations must continue with Washington in a flexible manner and in the interest of reaching a resolution earlier rather than later.

But Japan now finds itself in a Catch-22 situation as protecting what Japan deems to be its "national interests" was one of the key platforms for the now ruling Liberal Democratic Party of Japan's (LDP) general election pledge.

Reneging on this pledge for the sake of the TPP deal will likely draw a harsh backlash from Japan's powerful farm lobbies, from which Abe and the LDP derive a lot of political support.

To the end and in a separate meeting Thursday, Shigeru Ishiba, secretary general of Abe's Liberal Democratic Party, told Nishimura to ensure that Japan's "national interests" are protected as TPP negotiations reach the eleventh-hour.

"I'd like to ask you to move forward with the ongoing negotiations to maximize national interests, so our campaign pledge can be kept," Ishiba was quoted as telling Nishimura at the LDP headquarters earlier Thursday.

The TPP alliances, when negotiations have concluded, could potentially create a free-trade bloc that will comprise some 40 percent of the global economy, according to leading economists, but with Abe pushing for a deal to be made to underpin his long- term, "third arrow" structural reform plans, under his aggressive "Abenomics" economic policy, his support base from farm lobbies could be diminished and the veracity of the LDP's election campaign called into question.

Source: Xinhua

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