Poor ASEAN members appeal to richer partner nations
Poor ASEAN members appeal to richer partner nations
HANOI (AFP): Poorer members of the diverse Southeast Asian bloc Saturday stepped up demands for their more advanced partners to intensify efforts to narrow the yawning gap in levels of regional affluence.
"Narrowing down the development gap between member countries" would be one of the "major tasks" for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in the years to come, Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Dy Nien said.
ASEAN needed to create "a stable environment for the development of each country and the region as a whole", Nien told senior ASEAN officials as they wrapped up talks preparing for a meeting here of their foreign ministers from Monday.
The ministers are due to adopt an Initiative for ASEAN Integration which has been one of the main priorities of Vietnam's year-long tenure of the regional grouping's rotating chairmanship.
The initiative sets out the commitments of ASEAN's six core members -- Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand -- to help the integration of newcomers Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.
The bloc, a market of 500 million people, encompasses some of the world's poorest countries with one of the richest, Singapore.
Cambodian Foreign Minister Hor Namhong said "the most fundamental problem for ASEAN is how ASEAN people will seek ASEAN integration".
"From my point of view ASEAN needs to reach as soon as possible full integration so it can move forward in this globalised world," he told AFP in Phnom Penh before leaving for Vietnam.
Hor Namhong said this included the ASEAN Free Trade Area, which aims to bring down tariffs to between zero and five percent by 2003 for ASEAN's more developed members.
"We have to implement what we have decided."
The Vietnamese minister said the promotion of regional stability would be a top priority for the ministers' meeting, which comes against the backdrop of renewed turmoil in Indonesia with parliament at war with President Abdurrahman Wahid.
The economic climate is also turning chilly with the US slowdown slamming the brakes on the technology sector that powered East Asia's export-led recovery from the 1997 crisis.
Nien said ASEAN had set up a task force to look at integrating its less advanced members and that the foreign ministers were likely to issue a declaration pledging their support for the initiative.
ASEAN Secretary General Rodolfo Severino, acknowledging the economic gap between members "is pretty wide", said the task force would take on board some of the lessons learned in the process of European integration.
"We're trying to do the same thing," he told reporters after the officials' preparatory talks.
"Not in the same way of course because in the EU there were transfers of massive resources but we are doing things differently -- basically through the building up of human resources, developing institutions, capacity building."
Severino said areas of cooperation included infrastructure, human-resource development and information technology.
"And we're also talking with the Plus Three countries in the interest of these purposes."
The ministers' two days of talks will be followed by sessions of "ASEAN Plus Three" involving China, Japan and South Korea and the ASEAN Regional Forum, which will bring in heavyweights including US Secretary of State Colin Powell.