Indonesian president closes 2013 APEC summit, reiterating 'strategic points'

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono announced the conclusion of the week-long event on Tuesday, reiterating strategic points that have been agreed by APEC leaders attending the summit. "I am pleased to say that our summit went on successfully and very productive. After our intensive discussions conducted by our officials, needless to say, the whole long-year deliberations among our officials, we have agreed a number of strategic points," President Yudhoyono told a press conference at the end of the APEC summit. He said that among the strategic partnership agreed by APEC leaders were commitments to attaining the Bogor Goals by 2020. The Bogor Goals, with open and free trade and investment as its main objective, served to promote economic cooperation among APEC members in sharing, engaging and opening opportunities among stakeholders. The president said that leaders also agreed to increase intra APEC trade and intra region trade, so as to provide facilitations and the counseling of multilateral trading system. The APEC leaders also agreed to make the upcoming WTO Ninth Ministerial Meeting scheduled to be held in Bali in December this year a great success, the president added. Accelerating the physical, institutional and people-to-people connectivity was also a focal point agreed by the leaders as it would improve business climate, reduce production and transportation costs and improving supply chain in the region. "At the same time, infrastructure and connectivity development will create more jobs and ensure job security," President Yudhoyono added. The other strategic partnerships agreed by the leaders were the commitment to achieving strong, balanced and inclusive growth by promoting and facilitating Small-middle sized enterprises (SMEs) business, enhancing food, energy and water resiliency to address impacts of increasing population and climate changes. "Leaders have also agreed to integrate process of the organization with other multilateral processes of East Asia Summit and G20," the president said, adding that cooperation among regional architectures is essential as the world is marked by multiple architectures of economic. The Indonesian president who had attended APEC summit 10 times during his service tenure added that good collaboration between business people among APEC economies would promote the creation of free and opened trade and attract investments. It was agreed by leaders in APEC summit this year, he added. All of those commitments were resulted after the whole year discussions conducted by officials of Asia Pacific economies in several cities in Indonesia. Indonesia hosted the APEC summit twice in 1994 and 2013 since its establishment in 1989. Beijing will host the 2014 APEC summit.