Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh urged the Asian and African countries to transcend past rancours and take initiatives to create new cooperative mechanisms and regional partnership.

Speaking at the on-going Asian-African Summit attended by heads of state from 106 countries, Manmohan Singh said "We must create new structures of mutual support, solidarity and cooperation to benefit from best practices and appropriate technologies amongst us."

In a statement released here Saturday, the Indian prime minister expressed the hope that the declaration on a New Asian African Strategic Partnership, to be officially endorsed Sunday in Bandung, will awaken a global conscience that recognizes the moralimperatives of social justice, poverty alleviation and core elements of the Millennium Development Goals. "Our strategic partnership must be inspired by a common vision of globalization based on maximizing cooperative self-reliance. It must benefit from the unique perspective of Afro-Asian countries to our specific problems," he added.

"We must strive to evolve formulae to phase out trade-distorting agricultural subsidies in developed countries and to remove barriers to their agricultural exports, while protecting the livelihood of millions of farmers," he said, adding "We need alowering of tariff and non-tariff barriers to our other export."