Opening Address at Expanded Session of Shanghai Cooperation Organisation Council of Heads of State.Part 1
June 16, 2009
Yekaterinburg
Вступительное слово на заседании Совета глав государств членов Шанхайской организации сотрудничества в расширенном составе.
16 июня 2009 года
Екатеринбург
PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Dear heads of delegations, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,
I would like to welcome all the heads of member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Today is our second event, the plenary session. We consider this meeting to be the culminating event of the Russian Federation's presidency of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
Active participation in SCO affairs and in the development of multifaceted cooperation within the association has long been one of the key priorities of Russian foreign policy. We see this work as a means of improving partnerships, strengthening the Organisation's cohesion, addressing common challenges and enhancing the international range of our organisation's influence.
Of course all SCO members and observer states have to take into account the difficult political and economic situation that currently exists in the world. This was the main subject of discussion today. However, I would like to express my conviction at the beginning of the plenary session that by working together and this includes joint projects we can overcome all the challenges that face our countries today.
Colleagues, the discussions held yesterday and today show that our general estimates of the situation, which involves the entire global financial and economic space currently subjected to this crisis, continue to a large extent to be similar or even identical to what we thought we'd be facing. Therefore, our responses to the current challenges will also be similar.
The general opinion is that we need to deal in systemic fashion with the difficulties that have arisen, something that involves close cooperation within SCO and between our organisation and other international organisations and institutions.
Today, it is essential to work on developing new standards for the regulation of financial markets and financial institutions. This has been discussed in various forums. The leading economies have made a number of important decisions at the G20, but that work is far from finished; in fact, it has hardly begun.
I believe that our work in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation can create mechanisms that will help us overcome the crisis. Of course we believe that we need to cooperate in a variety of forums and use a series of different tools.
In this connection the Russian side is suggesting that we hold an ad hoc meeting of experts within the framework of the SCO, with the participation of financial institutions, representatives of the SCO Business Council and its Interbank Association. This idea is in keeping with the proposals made by the People's Republic of China, Kazakhstan and other colleagues to conduct meetings with the ministers of finance and chairpersons of national or central banks. All of these mechanisms can be very useful at this stage.
Of course, we must think about not only overcoming the current financial crisis but also developing our relations, as well as providing security in other areas, including the energy sector. We have already discussed the need for a new foundation for cooperation, but I think that within the framework of the SCO we can continue to discuss different countries' initiatives and those of the Russian Federation, among others. This could be done within the framework of the SCO Energy Club, or in another special SCO forum. I am convinced that we must continue these discussions in one form or another.
There are other problems that colleagues have raised today, including issues of food security because in effect, as someone pointed out, the food crisis goes hand in hand with the crisis in the economic sphere. And here I think we have to make a considerable effort as well.
We talked about how to promote a number of economic programmes in addition to using various financial instruments. That discussion began yesterday and I think that our colleagues will obviously want to say more about it. I am referring to increasing the importance of various national currencies in mutual settlements to avoid becoming too dependent on the problems associated with one or more reserve currencies, as well as putting some of our foreign exchange reserves in our partners' financial instruments.
I think that this is also extremely important because no monetary system, certainly not the global monetary system, can succeed if the financial instruments it uses are denominated in a single currency. And as we know this is currently the case with the American dollar.
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