On 20 May, Cambodia’s eleven-month preparation for Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CP-TPP) accession entered its formal phase. Senior Minister Sok Siphana opened a national consultation in Phnom Penh, announcing that Prime Minister Hun Manet had elevated the country’s Fact-Finding Mission on accession into a formal Negotiating Working Group, Cambodia’s internal preparatory body charged with readying the country for formal accession negotiations with the CP-TPP Commission.
Hun Manet established the original task force on 17 June 2025 under Sok Siphana’s chairmanship. In September 2025, Sok Siphana led a CP-TPP Fact-Finding Mission to the United Kingdom. On 4 March 2026, the prime minister publicly named the accession push at the ASEAN-Cambodia Business Summit. The 20 May workshop convenes the Negotiating Working Group for its first formal session. A formal accession request to the CP-TPP Commission is the next procedural step the body is preparing toward.
As Cambodia graduates from Least Developed Country (LDC) status on the 2029 horizon, the country’s preferential access to major markets, including the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) benefits it has long relied on, will diminish, Sok Siphana said in opening remarks. The UN Economic and Social Council endorsed Cambodia’s graduation in May 2024, setting a five-year preparatory period. The United Nations Development Programme has projected post-graduation tariff cliffs across the European Union (zero to 8.8 percent under standard GSP, 11.5 percent at most-favoured-nation rates), Canada (LDC preference to up to 16.4 percent), and other GSP-providing economies, with an estimated total export decline of 2.4 percent ($771.8 million), GDP impact of 2.0 percent, and employment loss of 168,000 jobs, 57.8 percent of them women. Sok Siphana, addressing officials and Asian Development Bank partners on Royal Government letterhead, named the structural condition: “We must replace [preferential arrangements] with negotiated, legally binding, and reciprocal frameworks. The CP-TPP is our answer.”
The Asian Development Bank’s involvement predates the formal accession track. Through its Trade and Competitiveness Program and Country Partnership Strategy 2024-2028, the ADB has, in Sok Siphana’s words, “been helping Cambodia build its accession readiness long before accession was formally on the immediate agenda.” Yasmin Siddiqi, ADB Country Director for Cambodia, attended. Julian Clarke, Senior Regional Cooperation Specialist, was named in the opening remarks as having “invested considerable personal energy” in Cambodia’s CP-TPP work. Costa Rica’s chief negotiator Adriana Castro joined online, with Costa Rica’s accession sequence laid out for the room as the most recent developing-country precedent: formal request August 2022, Accession Working Group established by existing CP-TPP Parties in November 2024 following Commission consensus to consider, about eighteen months of active negotiations to substantial conclusion in May 2026.
Sok Siphana brings the institutional experience of Cambodia’s prior accession negotiation to the CP-TPP table. Cambodia acceded to the World Trade Organization on 13 October 2004 as the second least-developed country to enter through the full Working Party negotiation process. The application was filed in December 1994 and the Working Party was established on 21 December 1994; active negotiations intensified from the submission of Cambodia’s Memorandum on Foreign Trade Regime in June 1999. Sok Siphana served as a key trade negotiator across that process, per Cambodianess reporting on his portfolio. The WTO accession required legislative gap assessment, regulatory reform, and whole-of-government coordination on a scale Cambodia had not previously executed.
“The agreement is very demanding because it is comprehensive,” Sok Siphana said, listing “legislative gap assessments, regulatory reform, deep technical expertise, and sustained whole-of-government coordination” as the requirements. “The prize is significant, and so is the preparation.” CP-TPP standards on intellectual property, services trade, state-owned enterprises, investor-state dispute settlement, and labour-environment chapters require legislative and institutional adaptation that goes beyond Cambodia’s existing Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership commitments. ISEAS Senior Fellow Jayant Menon said the accession process is “rigorous and requires consensus from all current members”. The current members number twelve: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Vietnam. Costa Rica is the thirteenth. Member dispositions toward Cambodian accession have not been publicly mapped.
Cambodia’s 2025 exports totalled $31.28 billion, up 16.95 percent year-on-year, with ASEAN accounting for 18.1 percent of total exports ($5.67 billion, up 9.8 percent) and the European Union 16 percent ($5 billion, up 13.5 percent), Ministry of Commerce Secretary of State Penn Sovicheat said on 8 January 2026. The United States was the country’s largest single export market in 2024, taking 37.2 percent of goods exports, according to the World Bank’s June 2025 Cambodia Economic Update. China held 65.5 percent of inbound foreign direct investment that year. The CP-TPP membership composition includes neither the United States nor China. Cambodia’s membership in the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), in force for the country since 2022, covers the trade architecture that includes China. The CP-TPP accession track addresses the LDC graduation cliff across European, Japanese, Australian, Canadian, British, and New Zealand markets. The two largest dimensions of Cambodia’s external economic position, the US tariff exposure and the China FDI structure, sit outside the CP-TPP architecture and remain to be addressed through other instruments.
Sok Siphana addressed the global trade environment directly. The multilateral rules-based order, in his words, is “under strain as never before,” with the World Trade Organization’s dispute settlement system “functionally impaired” and the recent 14th WTO Ministerial Conference in Yaoundé producing “only limited and incremental outcomes.” He named “friend-shoring, near-shoring, and decoupling” as reshaping global production, and identified tariff barriers re-emerging “in new and more disruptive forms, often framed in national security terms.” His preferred term for the trend is “reglobalization,” not “deglobalization.” “Small open economies like Cambodia cannot afford to stand still,” he said. “We must be strategic, we must be proactive, and we must pursue every opportunity to diversify our trade relationships, deepen our integration into rules-based frameworks, and build the domestic institutional capacity to compete.”
The compound Western economic pressure on Cambodia carries multiple instruments. The LDC graduation cliff is documented above. The EU’s Everything But Arms (EBA) preferences were partially withdrawn by Commission Delegated Regulation of 12 February 2020, effective 12 August 2020, replacing duty-free access with standard most-favoured-nation tariffs on around one-fifth of Cambodia’s annual EU exports in selected garments, footwear, all travel goods, and sugar. US tariffs on Cambodian exports were revised in 2025 from 49 percent to 19 percent between April and July, per the IMF Cambodia Article IV 2025 staff report; combined with existing most-favoured-nation duties, effective border costs can reach 39 percent. The US Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) maintains active designations against Cambodian-linked entities and individuals under its sanctions authority. The CP-TPP accession track is the response architecture to one specific component of that compound, the LDC graduation cliff and the preferential erosion across Western GSP regimes. The other components remain in play through different instruments.
The workshop runs through Thursday, with sessions moving chapter by chapter through the CP-TPP text on customs administration, rules of origin, intellectual property, investment, and e-commerce, alongside the methodology for Cambodia’s legislative gap assessment, quantitative economic impact analysis, and negotiating simulations. By the close of Day Two, Sok Siphana said, the working body will agree on next steps and the allocation of responsibilities across line ministries. The agreement, in his words, “leaves no ministry or institution on the sidelines,” with the work shaping “the legal and economic framework on which Cambodians will depend for a generation to come.” The CP-TPP Commission requires consensus from all twelve current members for any accession to proceed. Costa Rica’s case showed an eighteen-month track to substantial conclusion is achievable for a developing country with sustained institutional capacity. Sok Siphana put the question to the room: “no longer whether Cambodia can accede to the CP-TPP, but how well prepared we will be when we do.” The 2029 LDC graduation date runs regardless.