2009-10-24 CRI Roundup

Hello and welcome to this edition of CRI Roundup brought to you by China Radio International. I'm Damin in Beijing.

An annual expo for China and 10 Southeast Asian countries kicked off on Tuesday in Southern China's Nanning city.

The Sixth China-ASEAN Expo is highlighting multilateral agricultural cooperation two months ahead of the launch of a free trade area among China and the ASEAN member countries.

For the first time, an exclusive agricultural services exhibition is being held during the five-day expo.

The newly-added agricultural exhibition consists of 600 booths. But that still has fallen short of demand.

Nong Rong is Vice Secretary General of the China ASEAN Expo Secretariat. He says many enterprises have benefited hugely from the agricultural cooperation between China and the ASEAN countries.

"Agriculture is one of the sectors with the greatest cooperation potential between China and ASEAN. Over the past few years, China and ASEAN have had close economic and trade ties in the agricultural sector. With the promotion of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area, China and the Southeast Asian block will enjoy an increasing number of tariff-reduction preferences and investment facilitations."

Five years ago, China and ASEAN launched a joint program called "Early Harvest." The program had scraped tariffs on about 600 agricultural imports on both sides by 2006. It was also part of the Free Trade Area framework agreement signed by China and the ASEAN members in 2002.

Guangxi State Farms Group is one of the forerunners in the field of China-ASEAN agricultural cooperation. Zhang Junxiong, its chief executive, says his company has been engaged in the production of cash crops in some ASEAN countries.

"In addition to Vietnam, we have begun cooperation with ASEAN members such as Myanmar, Cambodia and the Philippines. In Vietnam and Cambodia, we have built production and processing bases for cassava. In Myanmar, we have participated in the production of sisal hemp."

Zhang says with such high yields this year, the company has more ambitious plans for the Expo.

"Our group will hold an inclusive briefing conference and a contract-signing ceremony during the expo. We have a total of 35 projects to promote. And the volume of all the contracted cooperation projects will hit 16 billion yuan."

Besides agricultural cooperation, insiders say exchanges between China and ASEAN will expand to more fields including finance, science and technology.

Looking to a better future, Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang has hailed the close ties between China and the ASEAN countries.

"China and ASEAN countries have a long history of being friendly to each other. We are not only geographically close, but we also have similar cultures. In recent years, each side has made great efforts in multi-field cooperation, and the good-neighbor relationship has been greatly improved. Economic and trade cooperation, which has always been the cornerstone of our strategic partnership, has also achieved a lot."

Surin Pitsuwan, Secretary General of ASEAN, says this year's expo plays an important role because China and ASEAN will soon witness the establishment of the Free Trade Area.

"With the realization of the ASEAN-China FTA by the 1st of January 2010, ASEAN and China are now focusing their efforts on areas that would support trade liberalization to make the FTA more commercially meaningful to businesspeople in the region."

The China-ASEAN FTA will create a combined GDP of nearly 6 trillion U.S. dollars to become the third largest of its kind in the world. And in terms of the 1.9 billion people it covers, the area will be the largest FTA in the world.

And with that, we conclude this edition of CRI Roundup. If you have any comments or suggestions, or would like to listen to any of our programs, you can visit our website at crienglish.com.

I'm Damin in Beijing. Thank you for listening, and stay tuned for more on China Radio International.