Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam discuss AEC preparedness
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Officials from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam met yesterday in Vientiane to discuss the progress and challenges of the Lao pilot programme for narrowing the development gap towards Asean integration.
The programme was formulated as a pilot project in October 2010 by the Lao government, Asean Secretariat and Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) as a tripartite cooperation. It is a 5-year project and aims to help new Asean member states to implement their commitment in realising the Asean Community by 2015.
Deputy Minister of Planning and Investment, Bounthavy Sisouphanthong, who chaired the meeting, said this was the third meeting since the programme was initiated in 2010.
It was an important platform to enhance awareness and understanding about various key tasks in preparation for Asean integration, especially the readiness of Laos relative to the challenges and progress experienced by Vietnam and Cambodia in accessing the Asean Economic Community later this year.
Bounthavy said that even though Laos became a member of Asean in 1997 and had spent 18 years carrying out the important work of Asean, the country needed to play a more important role in three particular areas, namely tourism, the environment and agriculture, to achieve fruitful AEC integration.
The pilot programme has been contributing to narrowing the development gap and preparing for the Asean Economic Community by implementing three component activities as well as building human resources and institutional capacities in counterpart agencies.
The meeting is part of the capacity building of Lao government officials and the private sector in Laos, to enable them to deal effectively with issues concerning Asean integration.
Chief Representative of the JICA Laos Office, Koichi Takei, said the progamme is a pilot project to test the joint working mechanism among development partners, Asean and Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, to realise the Initiative for Asean Integration agenda.
The project targets Laos but is designed and expected to be disseminated to Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam. The first 3.5 years of the project focused more bilaterally on Laos, but for the last 1.5 years from 2014 it has focused on Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam. These countries are also benefitting from the project by sharing know-how, m ethods and experiences.
“If this mechanism is utilised in Cambodia, Myanmar and Vietnam, we'd like to believe it will further contribute to narrowing the development gap towards Asean Integration. We really hope that Asean countries will closely collaborate with each other to narrow the gap,” Takei said.
