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udging from the public'€™s interest, the decision to establish an Asian-African Business Council (AABC) could be one of the best results of the series of political and business conferences held in Jakarta and Bandung since Monday in light of the Asian-African Conference Commemoration.

This is because the council will contribute directly to enhancing economic cooperation, notably trade and investment, which will create jobs and generate purchasing power to improve the living conditions of the two continents'€™ 5.6 billion people.

The AABC, one of several measures adopted by 34 countries at the Asian-African Business Summit on Tuesday, will be run from a secretariat in Jakarta, the upcoming administrative capital of the ASEAN Economic Community, to promote overall economic cooperation.

The establishment of the council will ensure that all the meetings held during the five-day commemoration will not end up simply as a one-off gala event that will be forgotten after all the foreign delegates leave Indonesia, leaving behind a high pile of documents to be shelved in the Foreign Ministry'€™s library.

Business leaders attending the summit acknowledged that the US$13.3 trillion worth of two-way trade a year between Asia and Africa is way below the potential. Indonesia-Africa mutual trade, which totaled only about $10 billion, is certainly far below the potential.

Indonesia, as Southeast Asia'€™s largest economy and the host of the first Asian-African Conference 60 years ago, really deserves to run the council'€™s secretariat. To be effective, the first task of the council before its inaugural meeting, scheduled for later this year, should be to build up a comprehensive, reliable data center covering trade potentials between African and Asian countries because trade flows usually follow investment.

The council should tap into the experiences of Indonesian companies such as PT Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper, which for many years has been the leading exporter of high-quality paper to many African countries, Kalbe Farma, Musim Mas, Wilmar Nabati and a dozen others that have entered the African market.

The government can help speed up the data gathering process by organizing, in cooperation with the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin), a business conference with representatives of all the major national companies that have built up long experiences in the African market, and our trade attaches in major African countries.

Such a forum would help Kadin prepare a good, doable agenda for the upcoming AABC inaugural meeting and select the right invitees from companies that are really serious about seeking trade or investment partners.

The quality of discussions and the opportunities for networking between delegates during the inaugural meeting in Jakarta later this year will determine whether the AABC will be perceived by businesspeople simply as '€œanother talk shop'€ or a true trade promotion center.