TEHRAN – Iran has offered to share its knowledge of nuclear technology, industry, and agriculture with the Indian Ocean countries in a bid to help provide social welfare for the region.

“The Islamic Republic has made considerable achievements in nuclear, industrial, and agricultural sciences and is prepared to put these achievements and technologies at the service of regional cooperation,” Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki said on Sunday.
Addressing the eighth meeting of the council of ministers of the Indian Ocean Rim-Association for Regional Cooperation (IOR-ARC), Mottaki vowed that Iran will spare no efforts to improve relations with the Indian Ocean countries.
He expressed dissatisfaction over the limited amount of economic cooperation among IOR-ARC member states and called for more efforts to further bolster comprehensive ties.
“We should enable our public and private sectors to fully utilize the potential for regional cooperation in different areas and this surely requires the application of special mechanisms,” the foreign minister noted.
Mottaki said the IOR-ARC has the potential to set an example for cooperation in the region.
First Vice President Parviz Davudi also called for closer ties among the Indian Ocean states in the face of the “challenges of globalization, unilateralism, and some powers’ approach in different arenas.”
Expansion of relations with Indian Ocean countries is the Islamic Republic’s main strategy as it believes that “regional states will progress in the best way possible through intra-regional cooperation,” Davudi told the conference.
Elsewhere in his remarks, the vice president stated that implementing civilian projects is the absolute right of the entire international community.
“All countries have the right to develop various technologies,” he said in an indirect reference to Iran’s efforts to utilize civilian nuclear energy despite the world powers’ efforts to undermine the project by imposing sanctions on the Islamic Republic.
Using “illegitimate” measures such as sanctions to make countries relinquish their inalienable rights is a blatant violation of human rights and is in breach of international law, he observed