Efforts by New Zealand to push for a lame-duck vote in the U.S. Congress on the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal are being accelerated, according to remarks this week by New Zealand’s Ambassador to the U.S. Tim Groser.

New Zealand embassy officials are meeting with members of Congress from both parties to discuss TPP, Groser informed. The agreement was signed in February by New Zealand but has not been ratified. “We are fully engaged in this, and we will be accelerating our efforts,” Groser said at an event hosted by the embassy. “Obviously, we’re trying to work out what the real timetable will be. That is a little opaque at this point.”

He was joined by the ambassadors from Mexico, Singapore and Vietnam who also spoke in favor of TPP at the event sponsored by the Global Innovation Forum and the National Foreign Trade Council.

Not ratifying the pact would be like “dealing with fire” in terms of long-term economic and strategic implications for the U.S., Groser argued.

“The global economy is so interconnected, in ways, frankly, that normal political discourse does not recognize, that the consequences could be much larger than people imagine,” Groser told Bloomberg BNA. “We don’t have to go down the whole nightmare of the trade wars that occurred in the 1930s on the back of unilateral decisions to put up protectionist measures to realize that this is a very dangerous area.”