Asia plans trade bloc to rival Europe
Southeast Asian leaders finalised visionary pacts with China and India at their summit today, hoping for a pan-Asian trade bloc to rival Europe and the US, even as the region grapples with terrorism and epidemics such as bird flu.
The 10-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was to sign an accord with China to create the world’s biggest tariff-free market of nearly 2 billion people.
Similar free trade areas were planned with Japan, South Korea – and a blueprint for economic cooperation with India was to be signed before the end of the two-day summit tomorrow.
“An enlarged east Asian bloc can secure not only the future of the developing and less-developing countries of ASEAN, but also the future of China, Japan and Korea,” Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said ahead of the summit.
Add India to the mix, and it will create a “formidable regional grouping” to stand against the European Union and the Americas, she said.
The 10 Southeast Asian leaders met today in a conference centre in the sleepy capital of Laos for the biggest event ever hosted by the isolated, impoverished country.
The China FTA agreement, which aims to remove all tariffs by 2010, is part of a wider “plan of action” to cooperate in politics, security, military affairs, transportation, information technology and tourism.
It will “serve as the ’master plan’ to deepen and broaden ASEAN-China relations and cooperation … for the next five years”, said a draft of the joint ASEAN-China declaration to be signed later today.
The leaders of China and India were in Vientiane for a separate summit with ASEAN members, as were their counterparts from South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
The ASEAN members are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
The summit was being held amid repercussions of “recent terrorist attacks, the hike in oil prices, the spread of bird flu etc”, said a draft of the summit chairman’s statement.
The ASEAN nations also planned to adopt an anti-terrorism accord with Japan. But worries over terrorism and diseases paled in the euphoria over the emerging pact with China.
ASEAN will sign another pact today with India, a blueprint for future cooperation in trade, culture and politics. But a free trade area between the two regions is still many years away.
India is keen to attract investment in tourism, infrastructure and agriculture after dismantling its socialist-style economy 10 years ago.
Laos’ prime minister today urged Southeast Asian countries to invest in his country’s hydroelectric industry, as it struggles to start work on a massive dam aimed at easing poverty but slammed by critics as an ecological disaster.
Prime Minister Bounnhang Vorachith told leaders in an opening summit speech that host Laos is a landlocked country with few resources but with abundant water that it wants to harness with hydroelectric dams.
“We are aiming to turn the country into a battery for the region,” he said. “Hence, I would like to propose ASEAN countries to invest in hydroelectric power projects,” he said.
