The ASEAN Ministerial Meeting, which starts tomorrow morning, and the ASEAN Regional Forum and the Post-Ministerial Conferences that follow it are significant in several ways.

First, this is the first time that ASEAN is holding these meetings with all ten Southeast Asian countries in attendance as full ASEAN members. It is the first time that Cambodia is participating as a full ASEAN member. ASEAN Ten is now complete. This has great significance for the region.

These meetings are also being held for the first time since ASEAN's leaders issued the Hanoi Plan of Action in December last year. The Hanoi Plan of Action is a set of concrete measures intended to place Southeast Asia's economic recovery on an enduring basis, foster cooperation and mutual encouragement in financial matters, and hasten regional economic integration. Regional economic integration means bringing down barriers to trade in goods and services, dismantling obstacles to investments, and building transportation, communications and energy linkages within A SEAN. The Plan of Action would help to ensure that ASEAN's people have the necessary skills for the industries of the future, protect the environment for the sustainability of economic growth, and safeguard the poor and other vulnerable groups from the harsh impact of economic swings. It would improve food security in the region and foster mutual help in combating communicable diseases and fighting transnational crime, including drug-trafficking.

The ASEAN Foreign Ministers will review the progress in the Implementation of the Hanoi Plan of Action. Their meetings with ASEAN's dialogue partners will focus on how they can cooperate with ASEAN in carrying out the projects prescribed in the Hanoi Plan of Action.

The dialogue partners are Australia, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Russia and the United States of America.

The ASEAN Foreign Ministers will be preparing for the ASEAN summit that is taking place in Manila in November. That summit will review the implementation of the Hanoi Plan of Action and issue further directives. The ASEAN leaders will meet with global leaders of the information technology industry, a sector that is of great importance for the future development of ASEAN. The summit will be preceded by a joint meeting of ASEAN's foreign, economic and finance ministers, who will coordinate ASEAN's efforts to ensure that the economic recovery is enduring and that future growth is based on firmer foundations. They will map out further ways of encouraging one another in their economic reforms. The ASEAN leaders will be meeting with those of China, Japan and the Republic of Korea as part of the continuing interaction between ASEAN and the Northeast Asian countries at various levels and in many areas.

The ASEAN Regional Forum on the 26th will, as before, hold free and candid discussions on outstanding regional-security issues. These discussions will help illuminate the participants' positions on those issues and thus lead to greater understanding among themselves. The ministers will also seek to strengthen ways of building confidence among their countries and peoples and the possibilities for preventing conflict in the future.

The participants in the ASEAN Regional Forum, aside from the ten members of ASEAN, are Australia, Canada, China, the European Union, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mongolia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Russia, and the United States of America.

Finally, this ASEAN Ministerial Meeting is significant because for the first time the Foreign Ministers are secluding themselves in a retreat, just by themselves, to take a look at the state of ASEAN, the ASEAN Regional Forum and the dialogue system and explore some directions for them in the future.