Your Excellency Peter Sutherland, Ambassador of Canada to the Republic of the Philippines,
Ambassadors of the APEC Member Economies in the Philippines,
Distinguished guests and participants,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good morning!

It is my great pleasure to welcome all of you to the APEC Workshop on HIV/AIDS Among Mobile and Migrant Workers co-hosted by Canada and the Republic of the Philippines in this vibrant city of Makati, the country’s center of finance and commerce.

I am glad to observe that the workshop is well-attended by the foremost experts and practitioners in the fields of migration and AIDS prevention in the region; so, I am very optimistic that the discussions will lead to a vigorous and most fruitful exchange and cross-fertilization of ideas, which could in turn result in constructive and creative policy measures that would address the needs of managing the incidence of AIDS among mobile populations.

This initiative is really timely as it comes on the heels of the just concluded observance of the World AIDS Day on December 1, 2005, and it forms part of that global effort to combat AIDS and alleviate its phenomenon as a global scourge, as Ambassador Sutherland has mentioned. This is a genuine concern considering that approximately 40 million people worldwide are estimated to be infected with AIDS.  In Africa alone, there are many who die everyday because of AIDS, and it is coming up in this region in a quite fast way.

So, I would thank the government of Canada and CIDA for this continuing program and I know that it will score a big impact on our concerns, most of our concerns especially for migrant workers.

This workshop singularly addresses two issues in APEC: I’ve mentioned the issue of potential pandemics – much like SARS, Avian Flu, which is probably one of the three major issues that concern the leaders’ discussions, apart from the anti-terror and the WTO issues in Korea last month – and the Avian Flu and other emerging diseases and their impact on the mobility of persons as homos economicus or economic men.

At the recent APEC Economic Leaders Meeting in Busan, the heads of governments, the heads of economies, called for the networking of pandemic management agencies of APEC member economies to facilitate the formulation and enhancement of common strategies, greater vigilance, and rapid response to regional pandemics.

This is in recognition of the massive effects that pandemics wreck on individual economies in terms of lives lost, livestock culled and destroyed, disruption of travel and internal business transactions, diversion of resources to prevention and treatment, loss of efficiency and man hours, and most of all, the impact on economic confidence and resources that affect countries who are ravaged by such pandemics.

Nevertheless, while the protection of the public safety, both of migrants and their sending and receiving countries, are utmost concerns of all economies, the mobility of persons, as businessmen, professionals and service providers, is crucial to the functioning of the global supply chain in our modern international economic system called globalization.

For this reason, it is therefore imperative that health security regulations do not hinder but rather enhance, promote and give us confidence in the functioning of facilitating trade, investments, economic activities and the movement of people and skills in the region, while  addressing legitimate health, security and human rights concerns.

The challenge of this workshop, probably as a central theme, lies in coming up with regional models, business systems that would ensure the balance between security measures and facilitation.  It just has to be that way if the gains made so far in liberalization in the WTO and APEC, and in our regional/bilateral economic cooperations, are not to be negated and the protection of the health of communities are not to be compromised.

So, I foresee, that in the next two days would be very exciting and stimulating with the presence of experts from different territories and participants in this workshop to analyze these cross-border responses and to provide strategic resource mobilization as well as prepare for whatever pandemics that are on the way. You will have to study programs to scale up access to treatment and prevention; potentials for public-private partnership (PPP); issues on intellectual property protection and access to medicine; the so-called gender dimensions and vulnerabilities; migrant human rights and access issues; the social and economic costs of HIV among migrants and most of all on the  impact on economic growth and development.

You are then expected to come up with a set of recommendations because as senior officials in the APEC, this is what we are looking for -- outcomes and deliverables in such critical areas as health and security.  Considering that in APEC’s 21 economies are on diverse laws and practices, this is quite a tall order but I would also insist that APEC has been most effective  in dealing on these issues because of its cultural and economic richness.

 Thank you very much and welcome again to the Philippines! END