SMEs also benefit from ASEAN: RI

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Thu, 05/05/2011

As ASEAN races to become a community by 2015, many of its small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have yet to realize ASEAN’s benefits to them.

Rahmat Pramono, director for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) Economic Cooperation, said on Wednesday that Indonesia had set three main economic agendas for the 18th ASEAN Summit this week to enable people to reap the benefits from the grouping’s economic integration .

“Our internal agenda is to consolidate the utilization of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) by local enterprises. According to our data, there are still many small to medium enterprises that don’t know how to use or benefit from the FTA,” he told The Jakarta Post.

According to Rahmat, a lack of access to information on the FTA is one of the common problems facing most small to medium-sized enterprises. Most of them also consider the prerequisites they need to fulfill, such as the “rule of origin”, as overly complicated. The rule of origin asks for detailed information that is important to the importing countries prior to importing the products.

“It isn’t meant to make things more complicated, but simply to prevent irresponsible parties who want to misuse the FTA,” he said, adding that most big enterprises have no problem with the prerequisites because they have a lot of people on staff to handle them.

Indonesia is also aiming to encourage private sectors to utilize the FTA.

The second agenda is to propose an economic plan for 2015. ASEAN has appointed the ASEAN Development Bank Institute (ADBA), which has conducted research to support the agenda.

“We have our own data and we’ve listened the ADBA presentation. We will discuss it at the summit, although the declaration will not be announced at this year’s summit,” he said.

Indonesia is also proposing a program that is meant to develop small to medium-sized enterprises in the CMLV (Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam) countries. The program aims to reduce developmental gap between those four countries and the other six ASEAN member states (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam and the Philippines).

“ASEAN needs to work on this developmental gap so those four countries will be able to benefit from ASEAN’s cooperation mechanisms. That is why we need programs that will push their economic progress,” Rahmat said.

“In almost every ASEAN country, small to medium enterprises are the most important economic pillars,” he added. (swd)