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.