Vietnamese State President Truong Tan Sang has requested the U.S. to provide Vietnam with favorable conditions in Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations and remove all trade barriers.

Canada and the European Union have finalised the text of a proposed free trade agreement after months of wrangling, in a deal which is expected to serve as a blueprint for a similar agreement with the United States. The two sides initialised a deal in principle last October, but the talks then ran into trouble over issues ranging from financial services and investor protections to how beef and cheese quotas are shared out.

(Reuters) - A train from Vietnam's border with China pulls up at a station in Hanoi as dawn breaks, ready to unload goods for trade at what was for years the capital's most bustling wholesale market. The freight load is smaller than it used to be, as is the crowd of traders awaiting its arrival. Chinese goods, they say, are increasingly unpopular among their customers now the two countries are locked in a bitter diplomatic row.

(Reuters) - India refused to yield ground on Tuesday on its spat with the World Trade Organisation and said it believed it could convince other members that its need for more freedom on food subsidies was legitimate. Trade Minister Nirmala Sitharaman did not give details in a statement she made in parliament, but her comments offered a robust and uncompromising defence of the Indian position, suggesting the government planned to dig its heels in on an issue that has isolated New Delhi.

The Harper government's drive toward a free-trade deal with the European Union appears to be entering the final stages, with the announcement Tuesday that negotiators have concluded a text of the agreement. As CBC News' Chris Hall first reported last week, the two sides are expected to sign and release the text of the agreement in late September.

(Reuters) - India has dealt a potentially fatal blow to the World Trade Organization's hopes of modernizing the rules of global commerce and remaining the central forum for multilateral trade deals. In the short term, this is a setback for freer commerce. In the longer run, it means trade liberalization may advance -- if at all -- among narrower groups of countries, denying dissenters a chance to block progress.

HA NOI (VNS)  — Low value adds, poor quality of exports and heavy dependence on raw material imports along with poor processing facilities and transportation were affecting the country's export quality and efficiency.

(Reuters) - A group of World Trade Organization (WTO) members has informally discussed adopting a global overhaul of customs rules without India if New Delhi goes ahead with threats to block the deal, sources familiar with the talks said on Thursday. India has demanded the deal, which must be approved in Geneva on Thursday, be accompanied by a parallel agreement giving it more freedom to subsidise and stockpile food grains than currently allowed under WTO rules.

(Reuters) - Russia announced a ban on most fruit and vegetable imports from Poland on Wednesday and said it could extend it to the entire EU, a move Warsaw called Kremlin retaliation for new Western sanctions over Ukraine imposed on Russia a day earlier. Moscow, which buys more than 2 billion euros worth of EU fruit and vegetables a year making it by far the biggest export market for the produce, said the ban was for sanitary reasons and denied a link to the sanctions.

(Reuters) - A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday said Japan's refusal to drop all barriers to farm imports under a Pacific trade deal was unacceptable and urged the U.S. administration to cut Japan and Canada out of the talks if they did not give ground. In a letter to President Barack Obama, 140 House members, or nearly one-third of the chamber, expressed "deep concern" about the state of agriculture market negotiations in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), involving 12 countries from the Americas and Asia.