The Supply Chain Resilience Initiative (SCRI) launched by India, Japan and Australia, in April, will help in promoting trade facilitation by identifying supply chain risks and mapping out the complementarities, Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar has said.
“The flagship product of economic globalisation was the global value chain or supply chain which drove world trade. Not only has trade slowed down, the pandemic has also demonstrated that such supply chains can become vulnerabilities. They generated dependencies that can be crippling even when disruptions are not at pandemic levels. This and the recent global-scale changes in the technological and economic landscape have increased our resolve to make the supply chain ‘resilient’ to future disruptions,” the Minister said at the special session of the first edition of the Indo-Pacific Business Summit on Tuesday.
The SCRI was formulated with commitment to a free, fair, inclusive, transparent, and stable trade and investment, he added.
Better trade and economic cooperation can also be facilitated by comprehensive strengthening and reforming of the entire multilateral architecture, including the United Nations and its principal organs.
“There is a need to make global governance more inclusive, representative and participatory to facilitate greater and more meaningful participation of developing and least developed countries in global decision-making processes and structures and make it better attuned to contemporary realities,” Jaishankar said.
For India, the Indo-Pacific has acquired growing significance because the country’s trade is now increasingly headed to the east of India and a significant part of it passes through the Indo-Pacific, the Minister said.
Last year, of India’s total bilateral trade of $684.77 billion, with ASEAN it was $87 billion, with China $82 billion, with Japan and Korea together it was $38 billion, with the US it was over $88 billion, and with Australia around $13 billion.
In the Indian Ocean Region, India’s trade with Sri Lanka and Bangladesh together was around $15 billion, with UAE in the Gulf it totalled $59 billion and with Saudi Arabia it was worth $33 billion. In Africa, with South Africa, Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania, India had a combined trade of around $18 billion.