JAKARTA: German
Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday said Europe must step up its efforts to
establish a free trade pact with booming Southeast Asia.
"I am deeply convinced that Europe has to hurry
up in setting up a free trade agreement with this region if it wants to be able
to compete," she said during a visit to Jakarta.
As European nations are struggling to climb out of
debt, Southeast Asian nations are experiencing strong growth. Indonesia grew
6.5 percent in 2011 and is forecast to grow at the same pace this year.
On Tuesday, Merkel and Indonesian President Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono pledged to boost trade, which now stands at around US$7
billion, and Indonesian officials forecast it to reach US$12 billion by 2014.
The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations
(ASEAN) and the European Union in May 2007 agreed to start free trade agreement
talks after years of wrangling over human rights abuses in Myanmar.
The EU has begun negotiating agreements with
individual ASEAN states, including Malaysia and Singapore. Myanmar in April
pushed for an EU-ASEAN agreement, citing major reforms in the country.
ASEAN as a whole represents the EU's third-largest
trading partner outside Europe, with more than 206 billion euros (US$253
billion) of trade in goods and services in 2011, according to the European
Commission.
The EU is ASEAN's second-largest trading partner after
China, accounting for around 11 percent of ASEAN trade.
ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos,
Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Merkel, who arrived for her first official visit to
Southeast Asia's largest economy on Tuesday, was due to depart for Berlin later
Wednesday.
She also visited a tsunami early warning centre in
Jakarta, built with help from German experts and 53 million euros of German
funding after a tsunami in 2004 killed 170,000 people in Indonesia's Aceh
province.
The system consists of a network of tidal gauges,
buoys and seismic monitors.
- AFP/ir
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