HUNGARY believes that the real challenge of realising the free trade agreement (FTA) talks between the European Union (EU) and ASEAN lies in the latter regional bloc's diverse economies as opposed to political differences involving Myanmar in recent years, its foreign affairs minister said here yesterday.

Previous news reports had stated that both regional organisations halted the proposal in 2009, as the Myanmar issue of human right violations was seen as the stumbling block to these negotiations.

In an interview with The Brunei Times, His Excellency Janos Martonyi believed that Myanmar was never the issue.

" I think the real issue is not political, politically there is no obstacle whatsoever. The issue here is economic, and it is that ASEAN is a very much diverse group of countries," he said, shortly after concluding his participation in the 19th ASEAN-EU Ministerial Meeting that ended yesterday.

He explained that it was very difficult to put a country with a strong economy, such as Brunei for instance, with the poorest nations in ASEAN on the same level.

"Or indeed in terms of population, you have here Indonesia with almost 250 million people, you have much smaller countries...I'd say differences in the economic system of different countries, so it's a diverse community," Martonyi added.

"That's why the idea was accepted in 2009 that maybe we should go ahead with each country as fast as we can, and once we have made progress on all of them or most of them, then we can sit down and we can see how we could put in the same framework, that is a kind of region-to-region agreement."

In light of the recent suspension of sanctions in Myanmar by EU, Martonyi commented: "What I can say is that there is no political problems anymore in this respect and hopefully the change in Myanmar will be stable."

"Re-promote free trade, we hope that bilateral free trade agreements can be concluded (or) completed under one hand (of) EU and ASEAN member states," he said, when asked how Hungary would contribute to the realisation of the FTA.

The minister said that the idea was that upon the establishment of the ASEAN Community which includes the Economic Community in 2015, the two organisations could sit down and "try to negotiate and conclude a region-to-region free trade agreement."

"We are interested in that. So we support free trade in general and we believe that Hungary is also very much interested in the dismantling of trade barriers, which would also improve our possibilities for exportation I believe."

(Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Brunei Times)