Your Excellency the Right Honourable Girija Prasad Koirala, Prime Minister of Nepal,

Your Excellency Mr. Adrianus Mooy, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific,

Your Excellencies the Secretaries-General of the Economic Cooperation Organization, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation and the Forum Secretariat,

Excellencies, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen:

I wish, on behalf of the ASEAN Secretariat, to thank, through you, Mr. Prime Minister, the Government and people of Nepal for the gracious welcome and assistance that they and you have extended to me and my delegation. Nepal has provided us with the idyllic setting in which to conduct our work. This, I am sure, will make our participation in these consultations productive and enjoyable.

We thank you, Mr. Prime Minister, for sharing your thoughts with us and giving us your guidance this morning. Our deliberations shall derive inspiration from them.

We thank the SAARC Secretariat for hosting these consultations. The arrangements that it has made have laid the foundation for their success.

And we thank ESCAP and its Executive Secretary, a distinguished son of ASEAN, for bringing us together in these annual consultations, enriching our discussions with their deep knowledge of the economic and social conditions of the region that we share.

ASEAN considers these consultations to be of great value to the Association and its members. They give ASEAN and the other sub-regional associations of Asia and the Pacific an opportunity to learn from one another about how we can better promote regional cooperation and how our organizations can cooperate among themselves for the good of all.

All of our organizations were founded to foster political, economic, social and cultural cooperation within our respective sub-regions. Developments over the years have progressively reinforced the validity of this goal. The globalization of markets has, in particular, brought home to all of us the reality that individual national economies are no longer capable of operating on their own in an increasingly integrated and competitive global marketplace.

Similarly, each of our organizations has been working to prevent conflict, promote political consultations, balance strategic interests, and thus ensure peace and stability in our subregions. Environmental pollution, drug-trafficking and other transnational crimes and the demand of modern industry for human skills respect no national boundaries and thus require the utmost cooperation.

For us in ASEAN, the ravages of the crisis in capital markets, have impelled us to hasten the integration of the regional economy. We have done this principally through the ASEAN Free Trade Area and through the development of regional infrastructure. We have moved forward in liberalizing trade in services. We have decided to open, in concert, our industries further to foreign investment.

Our neighbors in other parts of Asia and the Pacific are driven by similar forces. This is why we consult with one another today. We have gathered here in Kathmandu to learn from one another how we, as associations of nations, manage and confront such forces and take advantage of and benefit from them. At the same time, we meet to explore how our associations themselves can cooperate with one another. We shall seek ways to work with one another in dealing with the crisis that is affecting us all. We are to discuss how to promote trade and industrial linkages between us. How, we shall ask ourselves, do we overcome the gaps in knowledge and lack of contacts that hinder our business and industrial leaders from forming profitable ties and common ventures?

Problems of the environment and of crime, such as drug-trafficking, respect no national borders; neither do they observe boundaries between regions or sub-regions. We should discuss how our associations could cooperate with one another in these areas. Surely, we can share one another's strengths in education and expertise as we seek to help our peoples acquire the skills that they need for the industries of the future.

We need not meet too often for this purpose. We can exploit the facilities of modern technology to carry out our cooperative endeavors, regularly consulting one another's web sites and perhaps linking them together, communicating by electronic means, and so on.

The important thing is that we now know one another personally and can get in touch without much trouble. Let these contacts lead to a growing network of familiarity and goodwill among our officials, traders, industrialists, scientists, journalists, cultural leaders, and students, in a new culture of cooperation in Asia and the Pacific.

It is in this spirit that I look forward to our deliberations.