ATTENTION - UPDATES with hopes for early integration ///

KUALA LUMPUR, July 25, 2006 (AFP) - Southeast Asia hopes to accelerate by five years to 2015 its plans to integrate the region's diverse economies in order to remain relevant, Singapore's foreign minister said Tuesday. Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers discussed pushing forward the target date for regional integration from 2020, George Yeo told reporters at the end of their annual meeting here. The ministers will put the proposals to their leaders who will hold their annual summit in December in the central Philippine city of Cebu, he said. "We discussed the importance of advancing the process of ASEAN integration -- whether or not we should move the target date for establishing an ASEAN community from 2020 to 2015," Yeo said. "It's something that we will put up to the leaders for their consideration in Cebu when they meet in the summit in December." Countries like Singapore and Thailand were for the acceleration of the timetable, Yeo added. It was "very important" for ASEAN to integrate "because the world is changing rapidly," Yeo said. "Right now because we are united, we are able to play a decisive central role in Asia. To continue playing that role we must be much more integrated than we are now." In his address to the ministers earlier Tuesday, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi urged ASEAN to speed up economic integration, saying it should never slide back to the Cold War era when countries sat on opposing sides of the ideological fence. The calls for regional cohesiveness came a day after global trade talks collapsed in acrimony over disagreements between major players. Yeo, who played a key role in the global trade talks when he was Singapore's trade minister, expressed regret at the collapse of the talks under the World Trade Organisation. "To me it's very painful... There's so much on the table in terms of potential gains to global welfare," he said. "So I hope that one way or another, the main players will come back and negotiate and find a way to break the deadlock. Because to abandon it now, there will be adverse consequences to the global trading system and it's not good for small countries like ASEAN countries." ASEAN, a market of 500 million people, aims to abolish tariffs by 2015 under a regional free-trade agreement -- a key ingredient to plans to become a single market and manufacturing base by 2020. ASEAN is also negotiating separately for free-trade agreements (FTAs) with China, Japan and South Korea, hoping this will become a catalyst for a wider East Asian free trade zone, potentially the biggest in the world. Some ASEAN countries, notably Singapore, have signed FTAs with key trading partners or are in the process of negotiating such deals. mba/dk/sst