Leaders of the six countries bordering the Mekong River on Sunday endorsed a broad program to boost trade and tourism through economic cooperation.
Leaders at the Greater Mekong Subregion Summit here signed agreements to create a regional electricity market and simplify border crossings while approving plans to build roads linking the entire region north to south and east to west.
Meanwhile, environmental and social advocacy groups held a news conference across town claiming that GMS programs often ignore the concerns of affected communities and could have disastrous environmental effects.
The summit signaled the first time that top national leaders attended a meeting of the 10 year-old economic association. The top-level stamp of approval will help put GMS programs on the political fast track, said officials at the Asian Development Bank, the multilateral bank that established the GMS.
Leaders “candidly and straightforwardly expressed their views on GMS” while showing “strong support for [GMS] flagship programs,” Prime Minister Hun Sen told reporters after the summit ended Sunday evening.
But the two-hour summit sidestepped controversy by avoiding discussion of specific programs or issues, an ADB official attending the meeting said.
The GMS has guided $2 billion in investment since it was formed a decade ago, bank officials said. About a third was supplied by the multilateral bank itself and the rest by government and private investors. The ADB expects to spend about $380 million in the next three years, said Rajat Nag, chief of the Mekong Department at the ADB.
The GMS program involves both so-called “hard” initiatives such as building roads, power and phone lines and “soft” initiatives creating policies to enhance trade and economic cooperation, said Sok Chenda, GMS coordinator for Cambodia. GMS programs complement Asean’s creation of a free-trade area by lowering tariffs.
Leaders signed the Agreement on Power Trade, a master plan to create a regional market for electricity. The plan envisages spending $4.5 billion to build transmission lines—initially between Laos, Thailand and Vietnam—and easing the process of buying and selling power between countries.
The plan will speed the electrification of rural areas and make energy supplies more reliable, the ADB said in a statement. Countries will be able to reduce the investments needed to supply electricity during peak demand, the ADB said.
The ADB says the agreement will reduce greenhouse gas production because more electricity will be produced by hydropower dams rather than by coal-fired plants. But dams have come under fire in recent years for displacing communities and disrupting river ecosystems.
Also on Sunday, China became the fifth signatory of the Framework Agreement for Facilitation of Cross-Border Movement. The countries have agreed to pilot-test “one-stop” customs inspections at a few border crossings. Currently goods being transported across borders are inspected on each side of the border.
The agreement also includes creating a database of information on cross-border trade investment and standardizing customs policies to speed crossings. Burma has not yet signed.
The agreements and initiatives endorsed Sunday serve as general frameworks rather than concrete pledges to fund projects. The ADB typically funds studies, provides expertise and puts up seed money while private investors and governments put in the bulk of the funding, ADB officials said.
Hun Sen announced that state leaders would meet for a new GMS summit every three years, the next time in China. “We reached a high level of political agreement among the region’s countries,” he said of Sunday’s meeting.
