Last week, Vietnamese cabinet minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Henrietta H. Fore signed a Memorandum of Intention (MOI) that will extend bilateral co-operation under USAID’s Support for Trade Acceleration Program (STAR). The Government of Vietnam and USAID now intend to extend the DAI-implemented program, originally slated to end in 2009, until 2011.

The ceremonial signing of the MOI was witnessed by Deputy Prime Minister Pham Gia Khiem and hailed by the Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung as an important step toward continued strengthening of bilateral ties.

Minister Phuc predicted that the much-heralded STAR program—which develops the institutional and administrative systems needed to implement legal and regulatory changes associated with the U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement and with Vietnam’s accession to the World Trade Organization—would yield even more positive results in the future.

Administrator Fore cited STAR’s expansion as evidence of increasingly strong diplomatic and economic ties between the two nations, ties that were underscored by her July 4 ceremonial opening of USAID’s new Mission in Hanoi (previously, the Mission was a regional office managed by USAID's Regional Development Mission for Asia Office in Thailand).

In a press release describing Fore’s visit, USAID noted that Vietnam's efforts to establish a market-driven economy—efforts to which STAR has been central for the past seven years—have decreased poverty more than 30 percent among that nation's 84 million people.