Negotiators for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) convened this week in Vietnam with a focus on resolving technical issues prior to next week’s TPP Ministerial meeting in Singapore. Floyd Gaibler, U.S. Grain Council director of trade policy and biotechnology, was in Vietnam for industry meetings with chief negotiators for several countries including Vietnam, New Zealand, Canada, Japan and Mexico.

“The sense of urgency is universal,” Gaibler said. “Negotiators from all countries are well aware of the clock. But at the same time, all of them recognize that there are some very difficult political decisions at stake, and that these will have to be resolved at the Ministerial level, or even higher.”

Japan was a late entry into the TPP negotiations, and bilateral negotiations between the United States and Japan — the world’s first and third largest economies — remain at a difficult stage. The Japanese chief negotiator stressed that Japan remains committed to a high quality agreement that will be enduring, predictable and transparent, as well as user-friendly for small and medium sized businesses.

“But agreement on general goals doesn’t make the intervening issues disappear,” Gaibler said. “Japan’s concerns about its sensitive agricultural products continue to be an obstacle. Japan is exploring other options to allow greater market access, but the elimination of all tariff lines is a sticking point. It’s still unclear what the result will be.”

While much of the discussion has centered on Japan’s desire to retain tariffs on imported rice, wheat, beef, pork, dairy products and sugar – Japan’s sacred farm products list — the Council also urged U.S. negotiators to press for privatization of Japan’s tariff rate quota for barley and malt to allow better flexibility for Japanese food manufacturers and brewers to access U.S. barley and malt. The Council also called for tariffs on processed products containing barley to be phased out as well.

TPP negotiators continue to say that it is more important to achieve a good agreement than to meet arbitrary deadlines, but there is nonetheless a desire to complete the negotiations this year to build support for adoption by member countries in 2015.