Iran’s former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has said that the Iranian private sector and the country’s chamber of commerce has been rightly selected to host an upcoming meeting of the tourism ministers of the Asian Cooperation Dialogue (ACD).
Speaking during a meeting on Monday with Mojtaba Dastmalchian, the chairman of Iran’s local Yazd Chamber of Chamber of Commerce, Zarif said that the private sector has great potentials for hosting such events.
Zarif appreciated the significance of Yazd’s historical sites and their world registration which he said has to be made use of.
In the final declaration of ACD foreign ministerial meeting in Tehran on June 25, 2024, Yazd was designated as ACD Tourism Capital for the year.
Private sector entrepreneurs, senior experts and tourism ministers of 35 ACD member countries are scheduled to convene in Yazd Chamber of Commerce for a meeting in late October.
Dastmalchian briefed the former foreign minister on the measures taken by Yazd Chamber of Commerce to host the event.
He expressed hope that the meeting will play a key role in expansion of tourism and handicrafts of Yazd and the whole country.
The Asia Cooperation Dialogue (ACD) was inaugurated in June 2002 in Cha-Am, Thailand, where 18 Asian Foreign Ministers met together for the first time. The ACD is a continent-wide forum, the first of its kind in Asia, which aims to promote Asian cooperation at a continental level and to ensure coordination among different regional organizations such as the ASEAN, the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the SAARC.
According to its website, the ACD aims to constitute the missing link in Asia by incorporating every Asian country and building an Asian Community without duplicating other organizations or creating a bloc against others.
The first ACD ministerial meeting on tourism was also held in Iran’s northwestern city of Tabriz on August 29-30, 2016.
Iran’s local Isfahan Chamber of Commerce hosted the 2nd conference of chambers of commerce of ACD member states earlier this year in late April.