The Economic Cooperation Organization needs to get its house in order if the ten Muslim member states want to survive the era of globalization.

Clearly, it’s sink or swim for ECO.
Since the early 1990s, the capitalist countries of the West have been enthusiastically promoting trade blocs and economic cooperation organizations in order to safeguard their global interests.
Hence the countries of the Islamic world and other developing nations need to secure their own interests by reenergizing and building new regional alliances that cater to each other’s economic and energy needs and help solve each other’s problems.
Along these lines, Tehran is hosting the 10th ECO summit on March 11, with delegations from member states Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan and non-ECO states Iraq and Qatar scheduled to participate.
United Nations General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, who is on a six-day visit to Iran, will also be one of the guests at the summit.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will chair the summit, which Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon, Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, and special guests Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani will be attending.
Unfortunately, the presidents of ECO members Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan will not be attending the summit.
The gathering will explore ways and means to expand multilateral economic relations, and the participants are expected to issue a Tehran Declaration outlining the organization’s achievements over the years and setting targets for its future path.
The leaders will discuss cooperation in the fields of energy, trade, transportation, and agriculture and the campaign against drug trafficking. A number of projects, such as the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline and the Istanbul-Tehran-Islamabad container railway line, which is to be promoted to a passenger train line in the near future, may all be finalized, and the proposals to start the Almaty-Tashkent-Tehran-Istanbul railway route and Almaty-Bandar Abbas passenger and cargo flights will be evaluated.
ECO Secretary General Khurshid Anwar said in Tehran on Sunday that the organization also intends to establish a railway route to transport cargo between ECO members and Urumchi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. China is not an ECO member but it has strategic partnerships with several ECO states.
Anwar added that the initial phase of the railway, which connects the Pakistani capital Islamabad to Tehran and Almaty, Kazakhstan, will be inaugurated on March 11.
ECO was preceded by the Regional Cooperation for Development economic bloc, which was formed by Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey in 1962 and disbanded in 1979.
After a six-year hiatus, the three former RCD countries formed the Economic Cooperation Organization in 1985.
ECO had some modest accomplishments up to the time the Soviet Union collapsed, which provided an opening for expansion as the six newly independent Muslim republics that broke from Moscow, along with Afghanistan, joined the organization in 1992.
The expanded ECO was expected to become a far more active bloc because of the vast natural resources of some members, especially energy exporters Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
But unfortunately, over the past few years, trade between member states has only amounted to a little more than six percent of their total international trade, and the bloc’s energy have-nots, namely Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Turkey, did not receive the expected largesse from ECO’S energy powerhouses.
In addition, ECO has been undermined by Turkey’s aspirations for European Union membership, the endless war in Afghanistan, and the machinations of Western governments and oil corporations in Central Asia.
Despite all this, there are glimmers of hope for this year’s ECO summit, since the leaders seem determined to finally get the ball rolling for the economic bloc.
At long last, are we hearing the distant echoes of the beginning of greater integration among ECO member states?