The ROO 101 Workshop is part of a series of workshops and capacity building activities that will be undertaken by ASEC in collaboration with the ASEAN-US Technical Assistance and Training Facility and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for officials from ASEAN Member States to broaden, if not acquire, general knowledge and understanding on the rules of origin (ROO), i.e. from the basic concepts to the actual application of ROO.

The reason for organizing these workshops is to assist ASEAN members in ROO negotiations and implementation. Over the past years, ASEAN has been engaged by Dialogue Partners for FTA arrangements and central to these FTA negotiations is ROO; thus there arises a need to train new negotiators to cope with the on-going negotiations. In addition, as ROO issues become more complex, capacity building should be an on-going process.

Although tariffs go down to pave the way for market access, non-tariff measures that may have trade distorting effects are being put in place and maintained. ROO is one of the trade instruments used to advance protectionist motives although this should not be the case. Positions taken on ROO, which are set of rules or conditions that determine the “nationality” of goods being traded, are sometimes too stringent and therefore hinder the free flow goods. No matter how liberal a country is on tariffs, if ROO are stringent, there still would not be any market access.

Thus, ROO should be applied, as much as possible, in a neutral manner that would help facilitate trade rather than restrict. In reality, however, the application of ROO is dependent on the sensitivities of the countries industries’ that would need protection from competition. Finding a balance in establishing rules of origin that is trade facilitating (e.g. more liberal) and those that would address the concerns of the domestic industries (e.g. more stringent rules) is a continuing challenge.

In the next two days, as trade, commerce or customs officials you will learn the basic rules of origin, how they operate in free trade agreements, including practical exercises to determine origin or “nationality” of goods using different criteria and introducing concepts of certification and origin verification. By early to middle of next year, two more workshops will be undertaken. The second workshop will cover advanced rules of origin issues, including how they are used in free trade and regional integration agreements and their economic implications, drawing on case studies in the other FTAs. The third workshop will cover administrative matters related to the implementation of various rules of origin under different FTAs, examining issues on the certification and verification of Certificate of Origin to simplify administrative procedures.

We hope that this ROO 101 Workshop and the subsequent workshops will equip the negotiators to better handle the negotiations and properly manage the implementation of ROO.