Overview
- ASEAN leaders, who meet in Cebu on Friday, will focus on shoring up energy, trade and food supplies after Middle East fighting choked key fuel routes.
- A draft contingency declaration seen by journalists sets up emergency fuel-sharing this year, a regionwide crisis protocol and protections for freedom of navigation to keep goods moving.
- Host Philippines says the plan seeks to steady fuel and food prices and to protect more than a million Southeast Asian workers and seafarers near the conflict zone.
- Thailand is pressing a step-by-step re-engagement with Myanmar as its foreign minister seeks a briefing from his counterpart, though Myanmar still sends only a lower-level representative to ASEAN summits.
- On the sidelines, the Thai and Cambodian leaders will meet under President Marcos’s watch after two border flare-ups last year killed about 150 people and displaced some 300,000.