U.S. Deputy Assistant Secret: “Bangladesh is an important partner in ensuring security in hotspots around the globe”
DHAKA, Sept. 16 (NsNewsWire) —The United States has said their decades-long partnership with Bangladesh has helped bring about some of the most impressive development gains the world has ever seen, including self-sufficiency in food production, a reduction of the poverty rate from over half the population to less than a third, and a drastic increase in the survival rate of new mothers and their children.
The US thinks Bangladesh as one of the largest peacekeeper-contributing nations in the world and also thinks Bangladesh is an important partner in ensuring security in hotspots around the globe.
The U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs Manpreet Singh Anand passed the remarks on Thursday while addressing at The Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs which is a graduate school at The University of Texas at Austin.
“So we’ve come a very long way in a relatively short time, and while the wind may be at our backs, we have no illusions that there is still a very long way to go,” Anand said.
The U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary said they have no doubt that the economic and strategic weight of this region will continue to grow in the decades to come, making our relationships with India and its neighbors in South Asia ever more critical and important, both to the interests of the United States, and to the global community of nations.
Yet India is setting an example for the rest of the world to follow. In just the past couple of years, India has peacefully resolved a long-standing land border dispute with Bangladesh, and has accepted the ruling of a UN tribunal that delimited maritime borders in the Bay of Bengal.
These resolutions have resulted in renewed economic activity across borders and in the Bay of Bengal, which is an increasingly active node of regional economic activity.
“All of this is tremendously important, because South Asia – with India at its geographic and economic center – is still one of the least economically integrated regions in the world, with less than six percent of its total trade occurring within the region. Compare that to North America, where over 50 percent of exports are sold within the region,” Anand said.
So we know that South Asia can reap tremendous benefits from sowing the seeds of greater regional economic connectivity. And the region already has an ample supply of the most important ingredient: nearly two billion entrepreneurial, ambitious, and hard-working people, he added.
Other principal ingredients are what you could refer to as infrastructure hardware and software. The hardware includes the roads, rails, ports, and power lines that will help goods, people, and services to move across borders at faster speeds and for less money.
“The World Bank estimates that South Asia needs about $2.5 trillion in infrastructure investment over the next ten years. No small feat, but the right policies and investment incentives can go a long way toward attracting that level of capital, especially with smart public-private partnerships,”Anand said.