Country Seeks to Expand SE Asia Trade
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- Category: Business
- Published on Thursday, January 05 2012 05:15
- Written by Rod Hughes
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Costa Rica hopes not only to expand its trade with China under the free trade treaty but to other Southeast Asian nations, Foreign Trade Minister Anabel Gonzalez told the Chinese new agency Xinhua late last month.
Gonzalez noted that her country put special stress on China because that economy expanded between 8 and 10 percent annually the past decade. She also noted that when the free trade treaty came up in the first half of 2010, the pact did not receive opposition that similar ones received before.
Tastes and choices of the Chinese have diversified, the minister told Xinhua, and consumption trends have been enlarged during the past years. New products, like coffee, are being consumed in china.
Although one normally thinks of tea in connection with China, the fact is that coffee is not the only sign of changing tastes. Already, Costa Rican producers are selling growing quantities of palm heart, meat, fruit juices, orange pulp, leather products and even ornamental plants.
Soon rum and fruit extracts from this country will be available to consumers. But the opening of the market has also opening up opportunities for Chinese businessmen to invest in such infrastructure, aeronautics, clean energy, high technology, agriculture and the textile industry.
During this century the local textile industry has suffered, contracting to a mere shadow of its height in the 1980s. The Chinchilla Administration would like to turn that trend around.
In 2012, the government hopes to begin implementing a trade pack with Singapore and has begun negotiations with South Korea. The latter pact would, Gonzalez hopes, lead to further expansion of trade with Japan and India.
