DHAKA, Nov 11: Seven South Asian foreign ministers met on Friday ahead of a weekend summit in the Bangladesh capital to push a free trade agreement and a possible “economic union”, officials said.

The leaders of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka were to meet for the 13th South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) summit in Dhaka on Saturday and Sunday.

The foreign ministers, who were still finalising the summit agenda on Friday, also hoped to reach an accord on combating terrorism, in addition to implementing a South Asian Free Trade Agreement (Safta).

The Safta deal would create the world’s biggest free trade area and promote the group’s founding objective of poverty alleviation in a region that is home to 1.4 billion people, including 60 per cent of the world’s poor.

The meeting of foreign ministers also discussed setting up of a new economic body to take regional integration beyond Safta, an Indian official present at the discussions said.

“The ministers have made an ambitious recommendation — the setting up of a high economic council comprising ministers of planning and finance and their senior officials,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The council would aim to push regional integration forward to include “trade in services, enhanced investment and harmonising of customs union and, beyond that, a South Asian Economic Union,” said the official.

The agreement to set up a free trade area was signed at the grouping’s last summit in Islamabad in January 2004 with Jan 1, 2006 set as a deadline for implementation.

But negotiations have since stumbled over a sensitive list of products, rules of origin and a compensation mechanism for the least developed countries.

India’s junior foreign minister E. Ahmed said late on Thursday that the delegations had agreed to implement Safta on time and would work to resolve all outstanding issues by the end of November.

“There will be a clear message from Saarc leaders that any pending issues must be resolved by the end of November by the committee of experts,” he said.

The committee is due to meet in Kathmandu in late November.—AFP