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Officials from eight Pacific Rim countries will meet in Australia this week for tough negotiations which could potentially reshape regional trade relationships.
The five-day talks, which kick off in Melbourne on Monday, bring together senior diplomatic officials from Australia, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and the United States.
"This is the first time that they have met with the express purpose and the political backing to talk about this particular negotiation," Deborah K. Elms, a trade expert at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, told AFP.
The discussions are expected to set the framework for negotiations on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) which could in the future include the major economies of China, Japan and South Korea and key southeast Asian nations.
Elms, who has spoken to all the lead negotiators, said the pact was meant to be very broad and encompass all areas of trade but the countries involved were diverse, with specific areas of disagreement including dairy, beef, textiles and intellectual property.
"This is not going to be an easy negotiation. And I think that most of the trade officials recognise that this is going to be difficult," she said.
"This one will talk about agriculture, this one will talk about investment, it will talk about government procurement -- so it will be an agreement which will be unusual."
Whether the Trans Pacific pact will override the profusion of bilateral trade deals which have sprung up in recent years, is not known, Elms said.
"The language everyone is using is that it will replace existing negotiations because then you can make an argument that if you replace all these existing, overlapping rules it streamlines trade," she said.
"But then, when you follow that up with, 'Are you willing to give up the concessions or the benefits that you got out of existing agreements?' the answer has been 'no'."
Elms said what made better economic sense was to bring in more countries.
"You get the most benefits by far if you can get at least one of the big north east Asian countries, either a China, a Japan or a Korea," she said.
"One of those three or two of those would be fantastic because now you are talking about real market access and real benefits."
Nick Bisley, an associate professor in international relations at La Trobe University in Melbourne, said the new talks could "untangle this mess" of free trade agreements which have grown to between 80 to 90 since the 1990s.
"The TPP is in some respects an attempt to unpick some of the damage or deal with some of the consequences of the preferential agreements which have been set up," he told AFP.
"It is a little different from everything that has gone before.
"And it is an attempt to fix up some of the problems of the bilateral agreements of the past 10 years and try to get back to WTO principles but to do it in a more constrained way."
An agreement between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) covering nearly two billion consumers went into effect this year, creating the world's biggest free-trade area in terms of population.
There are also efforts to form a larger, all-Asian free-trade zone spanning China, Japan, South Korea and the 10 ASEAN states.
As Asian economies drive global growth in the aftermath of the financial slump, the US administration of President Barack Obama may try to shore up its influence in Asia through the new Trans Pacific talks.
"Clearly the Obama administration sees the TPP as a way of reinforcing this idea that it's back in Asia," Professor John Ravenhill, an expert on international relations at the Australian National University, told AFP.
"It's not like the United States is not a player (in the region), but clearly the Obama administration decided that it's got to run with the TPP to reinforce this idea that it's active in the region."
