SHANGHAI, April 26: Asian governments on Monday signed a landmark UN-brokered agreement to complete a massive international highway network that officials hope will rival the ancient Silk Road.

Twenty three nations signed the agreement to set up a highway network that will link Tokyo with Singapore, Istanbul and St. Petersburg in some 140,000 kilometres of routes stretching across the Asian continent.

The agreement was signed at the ongoing meeting of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and will go into effect 90 days after eight countries ratify the pact.

"This 140,000-kilometre highway will contribute tremendously to regional economic integration," ESCAP executive secretary Kim Hak-Su told reporters ahead of the official signing.

"All 32 countries have agreed in principle to signing, but it will depend on passing this agreement internally through each country, \ so not everyone (was) ready to sign," said Kim.

The agreement is necessary partly to determine the details of the network, from their precise routes to ensuring that each one of the 55 approved routes meet standards and that road signs are regularized.

The ESCAP said it anticipates that Asias landlocked countries, including Bhutan, Laos, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Nepal and Uzbekistan, will benefit most from the new roads by gaining better access to ports.

"For landlocked countries, the highway portends a revival of the cross-continent access that the legendary Silk Route provided in the early part of the first millennium," it said in a press release.

The UN first conceived of an Asian trans-national route in 1959, but was unable to implement the project because of geo-political hurdles at the time. "Under the Cold War period we could not think of any highway running through China or even Russia or the Korean peninsula," said Kim, adding that all Cold War states, including North Korea, had now agreed to develop the route.

The agreement in Shanghai will outline roads to be built and upgraded and establish minimum standards for the highway routes, while an overall budget and time-frame for completion are expected to be announced in 2006.

The main route - Asian Highway 1 - is expected to start in Tokyo and terminate in Istanbul, passing though North and South Korea, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Armenia along the way. A trunk route will extend through St Petersburg to Russia's border with Finland. -AFP