Brussels, 02/05/2011 (Agence Europe) - Karel De Gucht set off on the evening of Monday 2 May for Jakarta, Indonesia, where he will attend the first EU-ASEAN business summit on 5 May. On the sidelines of a meeting with the ministers for trade and economy of the countries of the Association of South Eastern European Nations (Brunei, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam), the European trade commissioner will discuss bilateral relations with the Indonesian authorities.
With a volume of bilateral trade in goods and services in the order of €175 billion, ASEAN is the seventh-largest trade partner of the EU, which is itself the second-largest partner of the South-East Asian bloc, after China. The EU is the largest investor in the region, where European companies invested an average of €10.4 billion a year between 2002 and 2009.
After the breakdown of the negotiations between blocs, the EU in 2010 launched negotiations for bilateral individual free-trade agreements with Singapore and Malaysia, and is planning agreements of the same kind with the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The EU also hopes to reinforce its ties to Indonesia, with which bilateral trade reached a value of €20 billion in 2010, with a trade surplus of €7 billion in favour of the archipelago. The EU and Indonesia, which have been linked by a partnership and cooperation agreement since 2009, created a prospective group in 2010, to look into ways of reinforcing their trade. (E.H./transl.fl)