ASEAN unity

Recent Philippine visitor - Malaysia's House of Representatives Speaker Johari Abdul, is calling for more unity and cooperation among the 11-member nations/states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN, which comprises almost 700 million people.

- Marianne Go

The ASEAN is a regional group composed of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, but has agreed to accept Timor Leste as its 11th member. It is a regional grouping that aims to promote economic and security cooperation.

Johari is, thus, urging the formidable regional and economic bloc to "take advantage of that population," citing further that the ASEAN region "has almost everything. We have land, we have water, we have people, and we have the money. There is no reason why we cannot be a world producer of food, either rice or other crops. Why should we be depending on the others? So if we can get together, our experts can get together...as I said, we have land, we have God given sunrise, we have people, we have water, we have almost everything."

But, he stressed, "What we need is courage to sit down and talk about food security, so that we not only become self-sustaining...but more importantly, become the exporter of some of the food stuff that counts...the entire world...saving the planet."