Peru will "undertake efforts" to strengthen ties with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which comprise some 600 million consumers, Peru’s Foreign Affairs Minister Ana Maria Sanchez affirmed.
On August 08 1967, Foreign Ministries of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand created the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Bangkok. The group was later joined by Brunei Darussalam, Vietnam, Laos, Burma and Cambodia.
The Foreign Affairs official highlighted 50 years have passed since the Asian bloc was established. In this framework, Peru makes vows, so it consolidates as "the most successful integration mechanism in Eastern Asia" by establishing the ASEAN financial community by year-end.
"Be assured Peru will celebrate this milestone set by ASEAN and undertake its best efforts to strengthen relations with allied Southeast Asian countries at this new stage […],” she underlined.
In the current year, ASEAN aims at establishing an economic community with the purpose of creating an area based on the free circulation of goods, services, investment and capital flow within the framework of equitable development, while reducing poverty and economic disparities towards 2020.
Likewise, she indicated the bloc itself has become a "development core" to establish an extended free trade area, which includes other partners, such as: China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, India and New Zealand.
The said integration project eased the beginning of negotiations required to create the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which –if successful- “would become the world's largest free trade area.”