ISLAMABAD, Mar 04 (APP): Prime Minister Imran Khan will virtually participate in the 14th ECO Summit today (Thursday) under the theme of ‘Regional Economic Cooperation in the aftermath of COVID-19’.
Prime Minister Khan will open the Summit in Pakistan’s capacity as the Chair of the 13th Summit, held in Islamabad in March 2017.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will chair the 14th Summit. While sharing Pakistan’s perspective on COVID-19 challenges, the Prime Minister will outline his vision for regional economic development in line with ECO’s founding principles of promotion of trade and connectivity.
Pakistan is one of the founding members of Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) in addition to Iran and Turkey. The Organization was formed in 1985 from the erstwhile Regional Cooperation for Development (RCD). Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan later joined as members of ECO.
As a founding member, Pakistan remains strongly committed to ECO which aims at promotion of effective regional cooperation, with focus on communications, trade, culture and connectivity. The Summit is the highest platform in the 10-member ECO. The Summit meetings entail exchange of views on regional and global issues of interest to the ECO region and review of the progress in implementation of ECO programmes and projects. Pakistan has been actively contributing towards advancement of the goals and objectives of ECO, including regional economic integration.
The prime minister said the rich countries injected $20 trillion to their economies to stimulate growth, however, pointed that the developing countries did not have the capacity for fiscal space to ensure liquidity.
He recalled his proposal of a five-point plan to provide developing countries the fiscal space to recover from COVID-19 crisis including debt relief, creation and redistribution of Special Drawing Rights, concessional finance, mobilization of climate finance, and ending illicit financial floors and return of stolen assets back to the developing countries.
Imran Khan pointed out that $1 trillion was illegally transferred every year from poor to rich countries and also to the tax havens. Apart from health and economic consequences, he said the COVID-19 crisis had exacerbated the manifestation of religious discrimination, xenophobia and Islamophobia in various parts of the world, which was witnessed in Pakistan’s neighbourhood as well.
He said COVID-19 lockdown enabled the suppression of people in occupied territories struggling for their right to self-determination. He said it was essential to reject any attempt linking Islam with terrorism and termed it the “biggest injustice” being done to the Muslims across the world.
The misuse of freedom of expression to cause pain to the Muslims by denigrating Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) must be stopped. Imran Khan said at the United Nations, Pakistan, Turkey and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) had initiated a proposal for the annual observance of an international day to combat Islamophobia.
With rich resources and enterprising people, he said, the ECO member countries represented half a billion people covering an area of eight million square miles and formed the geographical link in the Asian Continent east & west and north & south. He said the common cultural and heritage was nurtured by luminaries like Al-Bairuni, Farabi, Rumi and Iqbal, which could provide a solid foundation for cooperation under the ECO umbrella in sectors particularly trade, energy, tourism, agriculture and industrial growth.
The prime minister stressed that in advancing the common objectives, the ECO states must take full advantage of geographical location, economic assets, and political relationships. He said peace in Afghanistan was crucial to the success of such physical integration in the ECO region and expressed the hope that the successful culmination of Intra Afghan peace process would lead to durable peace and security in Afghanistan.
The prime minister also presented a six-point agenda as priorities and goals of the ECO on COVID-19, integrated transport network, intra-ECO trade, and cross-border pipeline projects. He stressed that the ECO countries needed to recover robustly from the economic and health crises induced by the pandemic.
He urged adopting a plan to build resilient healthcare systems to respond to such crisis in future, with a capacity to produce medical equipment to respond to chronic and infectious diseases. Imran Khan called for developing an integrated transport network to facilitate both intra-ECO trade as a pathway for trade among major economies.
He termed the Istanbul-Tehran-Islamabad commercial cargo train and proposed Uzbekistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan railway links the important regional connectivity projects, besides linking China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) with Afghanistan.
He emphasized on implementing the cross-border projects already agreed upon among the ECO members, including Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline and the CASA 1000. He proposed establishing an ECO Investment Agency and organizing an annual ECO Investment Fair where investment-ready projects could be presented.
He said the current eight percent mutual trade could be expanded 10-fold. Enhanced transport links would promote conscious measures for trade promotion, he added. The prime minister called for simplifying border procedures, establishing intra-regional institutional linkages, reinforcing existing regional mechanisms like ECO Trade Development Bank, operationalizing ECO Trade Agreement, and developing new initiatives like the Clearing Union.
He stressed promotion of ECO knowledge-based economies with enhanced allocations for research and development, and rapid digitalization especially extension of broadband.
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