•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   

The government hopes that the US Trade Representative will remove Indonesia from its priority watch list of countries that fail to protect intellectual property rights when US President Barack Obama visits the country next week.

Gusmardi Bustami, the director general of international trade cooperation at the Ministry of Trade, said the government asked the USTR to look into the issue last month.

In 2008, the USTR took Indonesia off the priority list and placed it in the regular watch list in recognition of the government’s crackdown on copyright theft.

But Indonesia was put back on the priority list in May 2009 as US authorities determined that Indonesia was no longer providing an adequate level of copyright protection or enforcement.

The USTR has estimated that the US music and film industries lose more than $205 million every year due to copyright infringement in Indonesia.

“We hope we could improve from the status during the Obama visit,” Gusmardi said during an international trade forum on Thursday.

He said the government had tried to convince its US counterparts that Indonesia was serious about tackling the problem.

“We already told them that we are fighting against violations towards intellectual property and are very serious about this. They could see that we are doing sweeps on pirated music CDs and software,” Gusmardi said.

Juniman, an economist from PT Bank Internasional Indonesia, said the issue should be discussed with Obama during his visit. He said the consequence of being on the priority watch list was that Indonesian goods would be subject to a tariff penalty in the United States.

“Extra tariffs will make our products more expensive and less competitive,” Juniman said.

Indonesia is the United States’ 28th-largest trading partner. The nations conducted $21.4 billion in trade in 2008.

Johanna Chua, an analyst at Citigroup, said Indonesia should capitalize on the Obama visit to attract more US investment. “If we want Indonesia to be on the radar screen of American investment, one of the key issue we have to address is for example to reduce the time it takes to start up a business from 60 days to 40 days.”

She added that the investment climate could also be improved by streamlining regulation.

“Indonesia is very liberal in terms of policy at the national level and in terms of trade. But if you go to the regional level, domestic trade barriers are higher than at the national level. So what we have to do is streamlining. This kind of thing is very important to show investors from US that Indonesia is moving forward,” she said.