Jansa: EU, Latin American Summit Valuable Experience
PM Janez Jansa said that participating at the EU, Latin American and Caribbean countries summit was a valuable experience considering that the next such meeting, presumably hosted by Peru at the beginning of 2008, will take place with Slovenia as EU president.
He explained in Vienna on Friday that while the technical and organisational aspects of such meetings were indeed the responsibility of the host state, Slovenia would have to take care of the summit's agenda, which is an equally demanding task.
On the margins of the summit, which was bringing together the 25 EU member states and 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries, Jansa also met Mexican President Vicente Fox with whom he tackled "two very concrete issues", namely the agreements on the protection of investments and on economic and scientific cooperation.
The Slovenia PM expects the agreements to be signed shortly and significantly strengthen economic cooperation between the two countries.
Jansa was also one of the introductory speakers at the plenary session. He took the opportunity to call for a fair approach to globalisation, arguing that developed countries had not only the responsibility of contributing development aid but also to open their markets to products from Latin American states, including agriculture.
According to Jansa, the two-day summit is focusing on the challenge of how to distribute wealth in a way that would prevent the rise of poverty in Latin America, which has been experiencing this trend despite relatively high economic growth.
Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel meanwhile said that the summit presents a successful exchange of opinions with interesting and exciting topics, yet without a large number of practical results or working material, characteristic of foreign ministers.
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