Myanmar to serve as gateway to South Asia

BANGKOK, November 28 (TNA) - Thailand’s neighbouring Myanmar will serve as a gateway to South Asia in the near future, once the physical connectivity within the mainland Southeast Asia is fully available. Speaking on Tuesday at an economic seminar in Bangkok, Akkasiri Buranasiri, Director of Thailand's Neighbouring Countries Economic Development Cooperation Agency (NEDA), stressed the importance of Myanmar as a gateway to the South Asian market comprising India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives, reasoning that South Asia has a total population of up to 1.6 billion, two times larger than the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), with the only pending practical factor found to be the availability of the cross-border connectivity. Another notable speaker, Olarn Chaiprawat, President of Thailand Trade Representatives and an advisor to Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, said that Myanmar also appears to be ready to serve as a garden to Thailand’s kitchen to the world policy, thanks to the country's abundant edible resources such as seafood, rice, palm and rubber products. Olarn pointed out that Thailand can also expand investment projects into Myanmar, namely those in the food processing industry, in order to ship processed food products to both West and South Asia. Olan acknowledged that the Thai government has focused on enhancing cooperation with Myanmar and South Asian countries, through government-level exchanges of business visits. The idea of developing the physical connectivity in mainland Southeast Asia was first raised in 1993 as part of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) development initiative, under which networks of land links are to be created and to be further developed into the "economic corridors" connecting Southeast Asia with China and India and now expanding to cover Myanmar. (TNA)