Welcome address by Rodolfo C. Severino, Secretary-General

of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations,

at the High-Level Conference on Social Development

in the National Development Agenda

organized by the ASEAN Secretariat and the World Bank

ASEAN Secretariat, Jakarta, 16 January 2002

          I have great pleasure in welcoming you all to the ASEAN Secretariat, and I thank all of you for joining us this morning.

          I thank especially His Excellency Kwik Kian Gie, Minister of National Development of Indonesia, for sparing us his time to speak to us and share his thoughts with us today.  You do us honor by your presence, Mr. Minister, and we look forward to your address.

          I thank the World Bank team of Dr. Lim Teik Ghee and Dr. Pietronella Van Den Oever, who have worked so hard with the ASEAN Secretariat’s social development unit over the past year to draw up and carry out the program that brings us together this morning. And I thank the United Nations Development Programme for its support.

          We are gathered here to provide a forum for senior officials in ASEAN to share their knowledge and experience in how to place social development at the core of the national development agenda and of the national development process.

          One would think that this is self-evident, that, of course, social development is part of the essence of national development.  After all, there can be little development if people are in bad health, are hungry, are physically weak, if citizens are not educated, if children grow up unhealthy, malnourished and unschooled, if women are illiterate and oppressed.  There is an even deeper, more fundamental reason.  It is that the whole aim and purpose economic, of national, development is the fulfillment of the citizen as a human person, the fruition of national society as a human community, that the human being is the object and subject of development efforts.  All this should be obvious, being at the core of the nature of man and of society.  And yet, as officials in the social ministries know, it is often a struggle to place and to keep social considerations in national planning for development.

          We in ASEAN are trying to do our part at the regional level.  The ASEAN health ministers have called on ASEAN to ensure that “health concerns are mainstreamed into the development effort,” envisioning that health shall be at the center of development before long.  ASEAN’s labor ministers have called for a “policy environment that fosters employment creation.”  We have elevated working committees dealing with youth, social welfare, labor and health to senior official bodies reporting directly to their respective ministerial forums, which now meet more regularly.  At their summit last November, ASEAN’s leaders devoted a special session to HIV/AIDS, issuing a strong declaration and adopting a work program.

          At the beginning of this year, the ASEAN Free Trade Area achieved its target for the original six signatories to the AFTA agreement, the target of reducing tariffs to no more than five percent – or abolishing them altogether – on practically all goods traded within ASEAN.  A few weeks earlier the World Trade Organization’s ministerial meeting decided to launch a new round of multilateral trade negotiations.  We in ASEAN look to regional economic integration and the liberalization of global trade to benefit our countries and peoples.  But they will do so only if, through them, people’s lives are improved and their dignity enhanced.

          The transcendent value of social development is, I trust, the premise from which our discussions in the next three days will proceed.  This high-level conference is only one component of a coherent program.  There is a series of six video conferences.  We held three of them last year – on poverty, gender and labor.  We plan to convene another high-level conference involving finance and economic ministries.  There will be training workshops.  The plan is eventually to build an electronically linked community of practitioners and policy-makers.  Already, an interactive joint Web site has been set up on the World Bank Institute’s home page.  It is great that information and communications technology is being harnessed to multiply the efficacy of our efforts.

          I understand that this conference aims to adopt the framework of an action plan.  I trust that the action plan will embody measures that are practical and feasible, nourished by resources and experience from within the region.  And I trust that these measures and the action plan as a whole will merit the support of the international community.

          It is in this light that I wish the conference success.