The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, and the Prime Ministers of Albania and North Macedonia, Edi Rama and Dimitar Kovačevski, respectively, will preside over the summit in Belgrade today as part of the Open Balkans initiative.
The meeting will also be attended by the Prime Minister of Montenegro with a technical mandate, Dritan Abazovic, the President of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zoran Tegeltija, as well as the foreign ministers of Hungary and Turkey, Peter Sijarto and Mevlut Cavusoglu, respectively.
As announced by the Serbian Presidency, the summit will be officially opened at 10:00 a.m. with meetings of the leaders with representatives of the institutions responsible for attracting investments, as well as with representatives of the food and energy supply crisis groups within the initiative. At 13:00h, the signing of bilateral agreements and a joint press conference is scheduled.
This is the second Open Balkans Summit, which will also be attended by representatives from Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which have not yet officially joined the initiative, and today’s meeting was preceded by the opening yesterday of the first international wine fair ‘The Open Balkans’ Wine Vision”, which will be held at the Belgrade Fairgrounds until 4 September.
The initiative was launched in 2019 under the name Mini-Schengen and was renamed ‘Open Balkans’ at the Skopje summit in July 2021. It was launched by the leaders of Serbia, Albania and North Macedonia with the aim of facilitating free movement of goods, services, people and capital according to the EU model and is open to other economies in the region.
As announced, the leaders of the Open Balkans (OB) countries will sign an agreement today that will regulate cooperation relating to food security. The two most important parts of that document will concern guarantees that Serbia, North Macedonia, and Albania will have priority in the mutual exchange of basic foodstuffs so that the population of those countries will have enough food in crisis situations, as well as mechanisms to prevent the re-export of food to other third markets.
The Serbian Ministry of Agriculture expects that trade in food with Albania will increase in the future, due to the increasing attractiveness of the Albanian coast to foreign tourists. In addition, they point out that the upcoming wine fair will also serve to promote the tourist offer of the OB countries.
The Macedonian Prime Minister said that at the Belgrade summit, the governments and relevant ministries will discuss, at the summit, how to find concrete ways to provide enough food and energy to get through the harshest winter since the Second World War.
Special attention, as he says, will be paid to ensuring that the region always has food and energy supplies, with an unimpeded flow of basic foodstuffs. “As good neighbours, we will help each other as we have done so far,” said Kovačevski, on his first official visit to Belgrade.
The Open Balkans’ Wine Vision, as announced, will bring together the region’s best wine producers at the Belgrade Fair and promote the Balkans as an increasingly popular wine and tourist destination. Some 360 exhibitors and wine producers from more than 20 countries around the world are expected to take part the Wine Fair, which runs until Sunday, according to the President of the Serbian Chamber of Commerce, Marko Čadež.
A common ID number and the first work permits are expected to be issued soon under the Open Balkans initiative, which will make it easier for employers from the OB countries to find workforce and for workers to find employment.
Ever since Montenegrin PM, Dritan Abazovic’s first positive views on the Open Balkans initiative and his participation in the OB Summit in Ohrid, the question remains whether Montenegro will join the initiative. Abazović previously told Euronews Serbia that a working body has been formed to analyse the Open Balkan initiative. “If all goes well at the end of that analysis, I don’t see any problems,” he said. But now Montenegro finds itself in a political crisis and with the government in a technical mandate since Abazović’s government was overthrown a fortnight ago.
The President of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zoran Tegeltija, said he hoped that the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina would decide that Bosnia would join the Open Balkans Initiative and that then the institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina would have to work quickly to try to come as close as possible to what the three member states (Serbia, Albania, North Macedonia) had already achieved. He also said that, as far as Bosnia and Herzegovina is concerned, it is good “that at least those three countries are opening up and expanding cooperation, but that at the moment, there is no encouraging news for the citizens of Bosnia or the economy when it comes to the country joining the Open Balkans”.
Kosovo is also invited to join the initiative, but political disagreements prevent this for the time being.
“All the energy problems that the region might face in the coming winter will be solved together and systematically,” it was agreed during the meeting between government, administration and business association representatives in Tirana in July.
Čadež went on to say that within the framework of the Open Balkans, there would be no ban on the movement of flour, sugar, cooking oil and other basic foodstuffs between the three countries, which was validated by the relevant agreement.
According to the data from the Serbian Chamber of Commerce, the trade in foodstuffs in the short period since the launch of the OB initiative, has increased by about 15 per cent and there is plenty of room to for it to grow.
Serbia’s total trade in goods with Albania and North Macedonia in 2021 was EUR 1.372 billion. Serbian exports to the two Open Balkan members were worth just over $1 billion, while Serbia imported goods worth EUR 367 million. Furthermore, citizens of Serbia, Albania and North Macedonia can now travel to these three countries only with an ID card.
(Euronews Serbia, 02.09.2022)
Photo credits: Tanjug/Miloš Milivojević