Greater Mekong leaders agree to 10-year plan to boost growth

Leaders of the six nations that share the Mekong River agreed Tuesday on a new 10-year plan to boost growth, development and poverty reduction across the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said.

In a joint declaration issued after a summit in Myanmar, the GMS leaders "endorsed a strategic framework for 2012 to 2022 that calls for a range of new measures to strengthen regional cooperation, including more effective resource utilization and more careful balancing of development with environmental concerns," a statement said.

ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda was quoted as saying that the new Strategic Framework for 2012-2022 will "move the GMS to the next level through multisector investment projects, policy development, and inter-sector coordination."

Created in 1992 as part of an ADB initiative, the GMS program now comprises Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam as well as Yunnan province and Guangxi autonomous region in China.

During their summit, the statement said, GMS leaders "also endorsed strategies to enhance agricultural development, including food safety and security; accelerate the development and implementation of the pro-poor sustainable tourism industry, with the creation of multi-country tour packages to help spread revenues more widely; and promote low-carbon development and enhance management of the sub-region's richly diverse ecosystems."

Over the past two decades, the ADB said the GMS program had resulted investments of about US$14 billion in projects with broad subregional benefits, including roads, airports and railways; telecommunications; energy; urban development; tourism; environmental protection; and the prevention of communicable diseases.

Since the start of the economic cooperation program, gross domestic product growth in the subregion has averaged about 8 percent a year, while real per capita incomes more than tripled between 1993 and 2010. As of September 2011, ADB assistance for the program totaled about $5 billion, the regional bank said.