MEXICO CITY - With a weakened and less predictable global economic order likely to be the new normal, it is all the more important that businesses diversify and develop wide networks for resilience amid such uncertainty, said President Tharman Shanmugaratnam.

This is also why Singapore is building new regional arrangements for goods, technologies and investments to flow freely, he said at a Mexico-Singapore Business Forum on Dec 3, as part of his four-day state visit to Mexico.

Mr Tharman cited the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which counts among its 12 members Singapore and Mexico, and how it is exploring further cooperation with other regional networks like the European Union.

Noting that Singapore and Mexico are marking the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations in 2025, Mr Tharman said the friendship and shared purpose between the two countries began well before formal ties.

“It indeed goes back to the Manila Galleon some five hundred years ago, the trading ships that carried silver from Mexico to Asia, and silk and spices in return,” he said at the event at JW Marriott Hotel Mexico City Polanco. “It was the first great trans-Pacific trade.”

The Spanish trade route had, from 1565 to 1815, linked the Philippines and Mexico, with trading ships making one or two round-trip voyages annually across the Pacific Ocean.

Mexican silver pieces were widely circulated across Asia in the 1800s, and used extensively in British Malaya and Singapore. It was also the currency that Sir Stamford Raffles paid the local sultan in when he first founded Singapore as a trading post in 1819, noted Mr Tharman.

In many ways, the Pacific Alliance-Singapore Free Trade Agreement, or PASFTA, will allow for a new, broader sea lane that connects Southeast Asia and Latin America more directly than ever before, he added.

The PASFTA, which links Singapore to the four-member Latin American trade bloc comprising Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru, was signed in 2022. The agreement has so far been ratified by ...