They expressed their commitment to strengthen economic and financial cooperation under the Singapore-Vietnam Strategic Partnership which will mark its 10 th anniversary in Minister Balakrishnan emphasised that cooperation between Asia and Europe remains indispensable in the face of increasingly complex transboundary challenges such as climate change, cybersecurity, and COVID Minister Balakrishnan highlighted the importance of global governance, integrating economics, and maintaining free trade amid present challenges.
They discussed common challenges of local governance and urbanisation and agreed to bolster city-to-city cooperation, including in urban solutions and smart cities development. Chairman Trung also hosted Minister to dinner. Minister and Chairman Trung discussed ways to strengthen party-to-party relations.
They also had a wide-ranging discussion on international and regional issues. Distinguished Guests,. Ladies and Gentlemen,. There are four reasons why this meeting, and this engagement is indispensable. First, we are transiting from a unipolar world to a multipolar world. In that multipolar world, Europe and Asia will play very significant roles. The third reason is that we are in the midst of a once in a lifetime digital revolution with a profound impact on jobs, society, and politics.
The fourth reason is that there remains a clear and present danger of climate change, for which a global response is essential. COVID is endemic. The possibility of it disappearing the way its predecessor, SARS did, 18 years ago β we have lost that opportunity. COVID will be permanent in humanity and it will come back in recurrent waves. We need to vaccinate, to test, to isolate, and to improve therapeutics. And while significant and indeed unprecedented progress has been made β if you had asked me a year ago if we would have vaccines within a year, as a doctor I would have told you that it was impossible.
But the impossible has occurred. What we are witnessing now is great asymmetry, for instance, in the distribution of vaccination. COVID decimated economic activity across the world. Because we all needed to impose some form of generalised lockdown, there was a very heavy price paid by all our people.
