DHAKA: Bangladesh believes that the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation should have a ‘development goal’ and its forthcoming summit is an appropriate forum to come up with a blueprint of cooperation to face the new challenges in the globalized world.
“Saarc should have a development goal like the millennium development goals of the United Nations,” Bangladesh’s minister for foreign affairs, M Morshed Khan, told a news briefing on Tuesday on the preparedness of the summit scheduled for November 12–13.
The minister identified poverty alleviation, tackling terrorism and economic cooperation as major challenges and called for enhanced cooperation among the member states to address them for the improvement of lives of 1.5 billion people in the region.
“How we can add fresh impetus to poverty alleviation initiatives of the South Asian countries with specific focus on a regional initiative for the purpose will be a major issue of discussion during the summit,” he said, expecting the next Saarc decade would be the ‘decade for project implementation’.
The summit will begin on Saturday in Dhaka where top leaders from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives will come up with their ideas to decide on the issues.
The summit is also expected to have discussions on cooperation in disaster management, education, empowerment of women, and issues specific to children.
Six out of the seven Saarc leaders would arrive in the capital by Saturday night.
Morshed Khan said the summit had a number of important proposals on the table, and the top leaders would ‘give their due concentration’ on them that included core issues of economic cooperation.
Referring to a ‘substantial’ progress in preparatory work on the South Asian Free Trade Area, Morshed said a few outstanding issues still remained to be sorted out and would get concentrated guidance in the summit so that SAFTA comes into force without any delay.
Although there has been an uncertainty over the implementation of SAFTA by stipulated time on January 1, the foreign minister hopes once the protocol comes into force, the regional economy will move ahead.
