For nearly 25 years, the US was consistently the best customer for Vietnamese seafood exporters. Although issues with trade barriers and tariffs kept popping up, Vietnamese shrimp, catfish, and tuna steadily found more and more US buyers.
But Donald Trump’s return to the presidency last year has made US buyers far less reliable. As tariff rates fluctuated, the flow of incoming US orders became wildly erratic. So Vietnamese exporters turned their attentions elsewhere.
By the end of 2025, China had soared to become Vietnam’s biggest seafood buyer, becoming the first market to take more than USD 1 billion in Vietnamese shrimp in a single year. Minh Phu Seafood, Vietnam’s biggest shrimp exporter, opened new subsidiaries in Canada and Australia as those countries, along with Japan, increased imports from the Southeast Asian nation.
China, Canada, Australia, and Japan are all members, along with Vietnam, in one or both of the two huge Asia Pacific trade blocs that launched in recent years: the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).
For Vietnamese seafood exporters, the pacts are an assurance of relative predictability and preferential market access more attractive than what the US now offers. Yet while certain other industries across Asia are also finding CPTPP and RCEP useful cushions against the vagaries of Trump’s trade policies and the disruptive side effects of his military campaign against Iran, the agreements’ net economic impact so far appears limited.
This could start to change as more Asian exporters seek out alternatives to the US market and paralysis at the World Trade Organization drags on. Many tariff reduction pledges made by RCEP and CPTPP signatories are only gradually coming into effect. Awareness of available trade preferences under the pacts is also taking time to permeate.
The promise of greater benefits to come is already attracting new interest in the Trump 2.0 era. Over the past year, the Philippines, Cambodia, the UAE, and Argentina have each applied for CPTPP membership, joining a waiting list that includes mainland China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Ecuador, and Ukraine; Costa Rica and Uruguay are expected to be accepted soon as the bloc’s first new members since the UK joined the original group of 11 in 2024. Meanwhile, Hong Kong, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Chile have applied to join the 15-member RCEP club.
“We have a multilateral trading system that is not working, [and] tariffs from one of our biggest markets, so we have to look at regional and cross-regional trading arrangements,” said Sihasak Phuangketkeow, Thailand’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister, at Nikkei‘s Future of Asia forum in Tokyo last month.
In a separate interview, Sihasak said his country, a founding RCEP member, is looking to apply to join CPTPP.
“CPTPP has a number of major economies,” he said. “If we don’t catch the train, we will miss the train.”
On a macro level, neither pact appears to have had a major effect on trade volumes. Annual total intra-bloc exports declined in three of the first six years after CPTPP came into effect at the end of 2018. Intra-RCEP export performance has been no more impressive on the surface: The trade totaled USD 2.95 trillion last year, virtually unchanged from the bloc’s first year in 2022.
The Covid-19 outbreak, which started about a year after CPTPP and was still ongoing when RCEP was established, has muddied the pacts’ impact.
“That created serious data challenges,” said Deborah Elms, Singapore-based head of trade policy at the think tank Hinrich Foundation, adding that the pandemic also short-circuited plans to promote pact utilization to companies around the region.
The regional agreements have had a particularly significant impact on trade between countries that previously lacked a trade pact link.
In the case of RCEP, ten of its 15 members belong to ASEAN, which lowered barriers to internal trade years before. ASEAN also had separate preexisting trade pacts with the other nations in RCEP—Australia, Japan, New Zealand, China, and South Korea. But until RCEP, Japan was not party to a broad trade liberalization pact with either China or South Korea.
Under RCEP, China has pledged to trim its previous 40% tariff on sake imports from Japan by 1.9 percentage points a year until it reaches zero in 2042. This has provided a significant boost to Hananomai Brewing, a sake producer based in Hamamatsu, in central Japan, cushioning the blow of higher US tariffs.
“For now, we are offsetting the decline in exports to the US with increased exports to China,” sales director Shinnosuke Takada said, noting the two nations are the brewer’s biggest markets.
Conversely, 58% of Japan’s tariffed imports from China last year utilized RCEP trade preferences, according to data collated by Kazunobu Hayakawa, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies, a think tank linked to the Japan External Trade Organization.
CPTPP has created more links between countries that were not previously cosignatories to a trade agreement, partly because of its more geographically dispersed membership.
For example, absent any trade pact, Mexico previously charged a 115% tariff on imports of barley from Australia, so none was shipped. With the launch of CPTPP, Australia has displaced the US as Mexico’s dominant barley supplier, and the grain has become Australia’s biggest merchandise export to Mexico.
Thanks particularly to demand from Mexican beermakers, shipments last year reached AUD 138.7 million (USD 95.6 million). Reduced Mexican tariffs on beef and wine have also boosted imports from Australia.
Australia had preexisting trade agreements with many of the other members of RCEP and CPTPP, but the pacts still managed to lower barriers. A government review last year said that reduced tariffs had boosted iron and steel exports to Vietnam, shipments of wine to Malaysia and Canada, and beef sales to Japan.
Indeed, due to more favorable terms under CPTPP, 59% of Japanese imports from Australia last year utilized the regional pact, while 29% rode in on the Japan-Australia Economic Partnership Agreement. Overall, according to calculations by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra, Australia’s annual goods and services exports to CPTPP member nations were 54.6% higher in the first five years of the agreement than during the previous five years.
“CPTPP is a steady anchor in a messy global trading environment,” said Arnold Jorge, CEO of the Export Council of Australia, which represents companies engaged in international trade. “It is keeping high-quality rules intact and giving Australia and its partners a practical way to diversify and de-risk.”
Both agreements have also begun to reshape supply chains. Under them, imports into one member state from another benefit fully from trade preferences even if the goods contain substantial inputs from third countries that are also members. The “rules of origin” in both agreements also allow for more inputs from nonsignatory nations than is often the case with bilateral preferential trade agreements.
“For companies, the strength is that there is a supply chain operating under a set of promises,” said Ken Itakura, an economics professor at Japan’s Nagoya City University who focuses on trade policy analysis.
This feature has been particularly beneficial for Cambodia, which has seen its exports to RCEP members grow 120.9% since the bloc’s launch, according to data collated by the University of Hong Kong’s Asia Global Institute.
Much of this increase has come in the areas of clothing, footwear, electronic equipment and components, electric wires, and automotive parts, with shipments to Japan and South Korea posting strong gains. Shipments to RCEP members now account for the majority of Cambodia’s exports.
“RCEP’s cumulative rules of origin let Cambodian apparel producers use inputs from China and still qualify for preferential tariffs in member countries,” reads a website promoting investment in Cambodia’s Manhattan Special Economic Zone.
Now that RCEP and CPTPP have been in operation for a few years, areas for improvement are becoming more evident.
Banh Thi Hang, a senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Competitiveness Institute, said RCEP’s rules of origin requirements could be adjusted to be more in line with those of CPTPP to make “the supply chain [optimization] effect of RCEP stronger.” Electronic certificates of origin would be another possible reform, she said, along with strengthening the agreement’s rules in newer areas like digital trade.
Participating governments also need to do more to make companies aware of the trade benefits available under the pacts and how they can access them.
“Lower tariffs on paper do not automatically produce stronger trade growth in practice,” Heiwai Tang and Guanzheng Sun of the Asia Global Institute wrote in an analysis in May. “Firms need to know that these preferences exist, understand how to use them, and find it worthwhile to comply with the agreement’s rules.”
Consequently, while the macro impact of the trade pacts has so far been limited, observers like Denise Cheok, head of Southeast Asia economics for Moody’s Analytics in Singapore, say more effects could emerge later.
“The benefits of trade agreements,” she said, “are usually realized over years, even under the best circumstances.”
This article first appeared on Nikkei Asia. It has been republished here as part of 36Kr’s ongoing partnership with Nikkei.