Implementing SAARC

As the 11th SAARC summit nears and the capital city spruces up, a clearer idea is beginning to emerge of what might be expected from the great occasion. Top of the agenda will be SAFTA, the regional free trade arrangement, along with the two broader based items of poverty alleviation and resumption of and fuller commitment to the SAARC process. While poverty alleviation is a comprehensive notion that touches almost everything else pertaining to SAARC, freer trade under SAFTA, which will also have a bearing on poverty, has been hobbled by uncertainty about what a free trade area should constitute. The problem here is basically two fold.

On the one hand there is the fact that the seven member countries of SAARC are at different stages of economic development and their priorities are therefore different. That India is already a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) while Nepal is not is indicative of this. On the other hand SAFTA, like all the other good things that SAARC has managed to work out on paper, suffers from a lack of the necessary political will and environment among member states. The difficulties that Nepal is having in renewing its trade treaty with its southern neighbor is an example of how things go when the political environment is just not there. It has been suggested and rightly so that the only way to get the trade treaty up and running again is through involvement at the political level. Similar logic applies to the question of progress over SAFTA.

To the same lack of a conducive political atmosphere can also be attributed failure to make serious progress in implementing all the other regional arrangements that SAARC has worked out or mooted. One of them is the food security arrangement that is almost as old as SAARC itself. There has also been much talk about bringing in a more liberal visa system common to all SAARC countries to facilitate intra-regional travel. But little has come of all this so far. Then there is the effort to work out a common position on terrorism, which too is stymied by differences of approach between India and Pakistan in the main. However good the ideas and intentions, it is in implementing them that SAARC has floundered. And now the coming summit is expected to see the ratification of conventions against trafficking and child rights, ideas which are perfectly sound in themselves. But unless this summit sees regional cooperation shifting into higher gear through greater political willingness, we may be in for more of the same sluggishness when it comes to implementing them. It is just as well therefore that full resumption and commitment to the SAARC process is one of the top three items on the summit agenda. Related to all this is the fact that SAARC summits have become characterized by much media hype and the heightening of expectations before the heads of state and government come together. But once the captains and the kings have all departed the great promises and pledges made tend to become somewhat academic. The SAARC process should now get out of that syndrome. The Kathmandu summit will hopefully see this happening.