Terrorism, food, climate likely to top agenda (15th SAARC Summit)

Terrorism, food security and climate change are likely to top the agenda at the 15th Summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation starting Saturday in Sri Lanka's capital, to be attended by the regional heads of states.
The eight-member regional grouping will approve the Colombo Declaration at the conclusion of the summit on Sunday. Chief adviser Fakhruddin Ahmed left Dhaka Thursday night for Colombo. Foreign affairs adviser Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury and foreign secretary Touhid Hossain were already in the Sri Lankan capital to attend pre-summit meets. Enhancing cooperation in curbing terrorism, guaranteeing food and energy security and facing climate change as a region are the issues most likely to gain focus. Delhi will seek greater cooperation from SAARC countries following the recent series of bomb blasts in major Indian cities and the July bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. Dhaka, among others, will try to seek a greater consensus on the issue of climate change and consequent sea-level rise, which could inundate a huge portion of Bangladesh and engulf almost the whole of the Maldives island chain. The region's foreign ministers, at the two-day Council of Ministers meeting ahead of the summit, discussed ways to activate the SAARC food bank to fight the global food crisis. Foreign adviser Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury, addressing the ministerial meeting on Thursday, called on SAARC ministers to tackle the major regional and global contemporary problems of food security and climate change, as well as trade. He urged SAARC to remove all non-tariff barriers that impeded commerce and posed difficulties for the least developed countries of the region. Fakhruddin is expected to hold three sideline meetings with India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in Colombo.