Apec failed to see the urgency of restarting travel and tourism. Can Hong Kong take a lead?

Fulfilling their responsibility to provide advice to leaders and government officials across the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group, members of Apec Business Advisory Council (ABAC) two weeks ago drafted a carefully worded letter to the region’s health ministers as they gathered virtually for the High-Level Meeting on Health and the Economy.

Inevitably, the urgent priority was the global pandemic, so apart from calls for a free flow of goods and services (in particular for personal protective equipment), innovative ways to finance health care, convergence around regulations to approve medicines and treatments, and cross-border health data-sharing, the council’s letter made a single forceful plea.

“ABAC believes that an important initial step demonstrating [our] commitment to cooperation would be for Apec ... to facilitate urgent development of health procedures and protocols that can lay the foundations for the earliest possible restoration of trusted travel across the region”.

It seems our health ministers were deaf, both to the message and to the critical urgency of the business plea, even as thousands of companies across the region face the looming prospect of insolvency due to pandemic-enforced lockdowns, and the need to lay off possibly millions of workers.

The health ministers’ joint statement talked of improving health sector funding, strengthening cross-border supply chain resilience for medical products and cross-border data sharing. But on the urgent need to restore safe and trusted international travel, there were the most perfunctory of platitudes: “The exchange of international and Apec region experiences and best practices helps to shape and inform policies that can address Covid-19 while improving health systems in the long run, and in doing so enable a return to strong economic growth.”