Inaugurating the second India-ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) Business Summit yesterday, he stressed on the complementarities between India and the ASEAN countries.

The current level of Indo-ASEAN trade now exceeds 10 billion dollars annually.

A key part of the Indian government's 'look east' initiative, the Business Summit was launched last year as a curtain raiser for the annual India-ASEAN summit of heads of state and government, scheduled to be held next month in Bali, Indonesia.

The Indian ministry of external affairs, the Confederation of Indian Industry

(CII) and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) are jointly co-sponsoring the meeting that aims at increasing synergies between India and the ASEAN.

The very fact that these meetings are being held at these venues (the third day of the business summit will be in Mumbai on Saturday is an indication, a senior official said, of the strong vote of confidence in the ability of these cities to overcome recent devastating acts of terrorism.

It is also an indication of the surge of confidence that permeates the business establishments of these countries, and their ability to overcome odds to make this century the Asian century, FICCI President AC Muthiah said.

Vajpayee, in his address, called upon the ASEAN and other nations to unite to protect the interests of their farmers and removing the asymmetries and imbalances in multilateral trade agreements at the WTO ministerial meeting to be held at Cancun, Mexico, next week.

"We have to insist that the multilateral trading regime takes into account the genuine concerns of the 'not-so- rich' countries for the welfare and livelihood of billions of their citizens," the prime minister said.

Developing countries were painfully aware that the development dimension of the Doha round was not receiving sufficient attention.

Concerns of the developing nations were "on a slower track," Vajpayee said, and despite attempts to highlight the asymmetries and imbalances in the multilateral trade agreements, these were getting side-tracked into non-trade related issues.