By  Sheel Kant Sharma

Kathmandu, Nepal: In the past three decades SAARC has developed actionable regional policy approaches, plans and perspectives in several areas of development including culture, rural development, food security, poverty alleviation, trade, education, public health, disaster management, energy, financing mechanisms, and transport. In fact creation of a functional South Asian free trade area recognized as truly one of the concrete and remarkable achievements of SAARC is today in good health because it is not sterile; the processes spotted by the SAFTA are moving forward and I will give you some details about them. We also signed our social charter in 2004.

My observations in the past two years have been that not only in Track I and Track II but even within the Track I, the implementation message which had been there in the summit since 2004 has not percolated down to the line ministries in full measure. So, in the separate gatherings I have been also laying emphasis on sensitizing the vast bureaucracies of South Asia for delivering what the summit leadership has consistently promised to do and consistently upheld doing. So somewhere along the way in the vast bureaucracies, the message gets lost and my experience has been that the eight actors who suppose to work together and provide strength to what the leaders have given then to sometimes become discursive and there is lots of time is lost in that process. And that is again something which I would like to bring to your notice because SAARC has done well in the last 25 years. It has managed to protect the achievements of the founding fathers and the achievements of all the successive summits despite the vicissitudes of relations among the SAARC countries and despite the twilight of political relations.

The implementers in SAARC remain the national governments and therefore it is necessary to attach due priority and a certain ownership to SAARC related works in line ministries. This is a point that has been made by me in the cabinet secretaries meetings and they appreciated this point. So these are the overall observations I want to make. Then I want to enumerate what we have done so far like SAFTA despite the critical analysis to which it had been subjected to; I would say that it has made progress. There was a meeting of commerce ministers held in October in Nepal and that meeting decided that they would reduce sensitiveness in tradable items by September 2010. There was also a notional figure of 20% reduction mentioned at that meeting though it was mentioned in an inconclusive sense. Second is tariff and non tariff barriers. There is a timeframe for their reduction and that process is also on and so far no glitches. Third is the standards on harmonization and this is also on schedule. There is a bit of a glitch due to non ratification by countries like Afghanistan and Maldives. But we hope that it will also be straightened soon. The SAARC Arbitration Council is also very much ready now. We have decided on where it will be located and the head of the organization has also been selected.

In the case of climate change, the SAARC forums have discussed climate change issues with great interest. Actually the SAARC ministers in Copenhagen managed to make a joint statement which helped to put down what our concerns are and I have been asked by the chair of SAARC, Sri Lanka, to make sure that this process of consultation within the SAARC governments on climate change is more active so that whenever next event takes place we are able to pull our efforts together. There is already an action plan which was adopted in Dhaka at the SAARC Climate Change Ministers conference in July 2008. And the SAARC environment ministers met in Delhi in October last year. They have endorsed the action plan again and they have also agreed to work on the SAARC Environment Treaty which is also progressing. Another connected issue with environment and climate change is disaster reduction and disaster management

The empowerment of all states has been to be seen everywhere. So unless we have something to relate to this media, the audiovisual and newspapers, and to make them focus on SAARC’s achievements, I think it will be lacking somewhere in a very vital sense. I have not been tired of giving these examples that many of you would have heard it that when we had this foreign ministers’ council meeting in Colombo last year, the financial crisis was at its peak. So the SAARC foreign secretaries worked for a whole day produced a statement on the financial crisis giving steps to it to be taken and that statement was very thoroughly worked out. It was supported by the ministers. The Sri Lankan minister as the chair of the SAARC council of ministers called a press conference, gave the document and appeal to the press to give it due  publicity. Nonetheless very little was given in the SAARC media about that kind of statement. Whereas, within three or four days, ASEAN leaders made a statement which was more or less along the same lines and that was given the banners headings in SAARC newspapers. So, we said that we ourselves somehow the other have an under esteem of our own work.

We should look at it and may be as a Track II process you can give emphasis to this area. So, before I end I would like to say that despite the problems SAARC is very much alive in kicking and the mechanisms which have been created are substantial. The only thing is that we should not lose heart; we should not allow ourselves to succumb to rundown and everything. They are again the eminent stand you bring to bear on your governments and to the Track II processes. There is a small little life and you put all the problems which you cannot solve bilaterally and otherwise you want SAARC to solve. So there I would like to say have a heart. Don’t burden SAARC with things which you cannot do otherwise.

Sharma is a secretary general of SAARC. Excerpts of the statement delivered by Sharma at the meeting of South Asia Center for Policy Studies (SACEPS) recently.

Source:Spotlight.