国内英语新闻:China proposes measures to assist less-developed Portuguese-speaking countries

MACAO, Nov. 13 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao announced Saturday that China will launch a series of measures between 2010 and 2013, which were aimed at helping boost the development of less-developed Portuguese-speaking countries.

Wen announced the measures when delivering his speech at the opening ceremony of the third Ministerial Conference of the Forum for Economic and Trade Cooperation between China and Portuguese- Speaking Countries here in Macao on Saturday.

Under the new measures, financial institutions from the Chinese mainland and Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) will set up a one-billion-U.S.-dollar development fund for cooperation between China and Portuguese-speaking countries, in a bid to push forward the financial cooperation between the two sides.

The Chinese government will also provide those African and Asian Portuguese-speaking countries that participated in the third Ministerial Conference of the Forum with 1.6 billion yuan (242 million U.S. dollars) worth of loans on favorable terms within a bilateral framework.

The new measures will also see China provide equipments, technical personnel, etc. to the countries, supporting a bilateral agricultural cooperation with each of the African and Asian Portuguese-speaking countries that participated in the third Ministerial Conference of the Forum.

Sponsored by China's Ministry of Commerce and hosted by the government of the Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR), the forum was created in Macao in 2003, with the joint participation of seven Portuguese-speaking countries, namely Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and Timor-Leste.