1. On the sidelines of the 68th Session of the UN General Assembly, Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se held a high-level meeting with the Troika+1 (Cuba, Chile, Costa Rica and Trinidad and Tobago) of the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) on September 27 to discuss ways to boost cooperation between the Republic of Korea and CELAC. CELAC is the only regional cooperation mechanism in Latin America participated by all the countries in the region.

2. The two sides took note of substantially growing cooperation between the ROK and Latin America mainly in the sectors of trade and investment. They agreed to hold ROK-CELAC Troika meetings to seek ways to maintain this momentum and expand the scope of their cooperation to include other sectors.

º The two sides shared the view that they should map out concrete blueprints for cooperation in different sectors.

3. Minister Yun proposed a direction of the ROK-CELAC cooperation, which calls for categorizing their cooperation into bilateral, regional and global levels, selecting fields of cooperation for each category and pursuing them. He proposed that the ROK and CELAC work together in the following fields on each level of cooperation: trade, investment, infrastructure, human resource development and tourism on the bilateral level; responses to natural disasters on the regional level; and development, security, UN reform, climate change and sustainable development on the global level.

º The CELAC delegation pinpointed development and response to natural disasters as its desired fields of cooperation with the ROK. Expressing its full consent to the ROK delegation’s proposal, the CELAC officials voiced the hope to continue working-level consultations.

4. On the occasion of the meeting, Minister Yun and his Cuban counterpart and CELAC chair Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla appreciated the remarkable increase of late in ROK-Cuba exchanges mainly in the sectors of economy, trade, culture and tourism and agreed to further expand bilateral cooperation.

5. Latin America, a region with abundant natural resources and an enormous domestic market of 600 million people, has lately seen a brisk economic growth, emerging along with Asia as a key growth engine of the global economy. In the ROK-CELAC high-level meeting, the ROK set the direction of cooperation with CELAC, thereby laying the groundwork for further expanding the horizons of cooperation with Latin America.

                    Spokesperson and Deputy Minister for Public Relations of MOFA

* unofficial translation