Indonesian Trade Minister Mari Pangestu said Saturday she wants the European Union to support certification processes for products and services within the Asean region as part of capacity-building efforts.
Indonesia, which chaired the Association of Southeast Asian Nations this year, is pushing for the E.U. to acknowledged the wide gap in the level of development between the two sides, which leads to some Asean products not being able to enter the E.U. market.
“First we need to know each other's standards and regulations. For that we need more transparency, this sometimes being an issue. Secondly they're advanced and we're still developing, so mutual recognition is needed,“ Pangestu said in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires.
“They're better in certification as they've started long before us. We want the E.U. to support certifications in Asean; that's the sort of capacity building we're asking,“ she added.
Asean, a regional grouping of Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, is one of E.U.'s major trading partners with an estimated EUR147 billion of trade annually, and one of few regions in the world to have posted positive economic growth amid global turmoil. It held its maiden Asean-EU business meeting earlier this week.
Robust growth and increasing ease on doing business makes Asean able to ask seek demands from counterparts. Indonesia's Deputy Trade Minister Mahendra Siregar said Thursday that it will continue to push the E.U to accept a definition of sustainability that encompasses economic growth and public welfare as well as the environment.
“European countries are mostly focused on environmental sustainability issues, while we think sustainability also involves other issues,“ he said.
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