An opportunity to review the balance sheet of the benefits and burdens of regional integration and opening borders lies ahead, at the Third Mekong Summit to be held in Laos at end-March. The leaders of the six Mekong countries are to gather in Vientiane for the Mar. 30-31 summit to “discuss the progress and chart future directions in GMS (Greater Mekong Subregion) cooperation”, according to Asian Development Bank (AsDB), which is facilitating the summit.

This summit among China, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Burma is aimed at helping achieve the vision of “an integrated, harmonious and prosperous subregion”, it added. Previous meetings were held in Phnom Penh in 2002 and in Kunming, China in 2005. While no surprises are expected — the summit does not even rank highly in the list of the region’s news events — it brings to fore the continuing debate about the brand of development that the Mekong countries are pursuing, as the Bank-facilitated Mekong programme reaches some kind of a midpoint more than 15 years since its launch in 1992.

To proponents of what the Bank calls the “Greater Mekong Subregion” programme, regional cooperation has brought clear economic benefits given the fact that governments involved would hardly even sit at the same table in the past. The early 1990s were a period when ideological and political differences were in thaw. Only in 1991 did China and Vietnam restore bilateral ties, three years after a naval battle near the disputed Spratlys, and

start opening more land borders. The Paris Peace Agreement for Cambodia was signed in 1991, leading to the UN-sponsored elections three years later.

Economic reforms had come underway some years back. Vietnam launched its ‘doi moi’ or economic renovation policy in 1986, and Laos announced reforms called the ‘New Economic Mechanism’ that year as well. Today, Bank figures point to increased linkages within the Mekong region. Exports are up more than 400 per cent from 1992 to 2006, and intra-regional trade has increased by 15 per cent, it says.

In a late 2007 seminar, AsDB country director for Thailand Jean-Pierre Verbiest says that the first 15 years of the GMS programme focused on physical linkages. “What has been achieved has been a lot of physical infrastructure... a lot of hardware,” he explained. Economic cooperation is now moving to the next stages. “When we all sat down in 1992, the only thing we could discuss was hardware,” he recalled. “As we go down, you involve more and more people and it’s harder to agreement on software.”

More efforts are needed from here on, he said, because “if we don’t work together, the economic forces will be so strong to move forward and there will be no controls”. “We recognise that infrastructure development comes at a cost and sometimes, significant cost,” AsDB managing director general Rajat Nag has said. “The solution is not to do nothing, but find a set of choices that accentuate the positive and minimise the costs.” — IPS