TOKYO, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- Foreign Ministers from 34 East Asian and Latin American nations on Sunday agreed to deepen economic ties at a cooperation forum in Tokyo.

    At the end of the Fourth Foreign Ministers' Meeting of the Forum for East Asian-Latin American Cooperation (FEALAC), the Tokyo Declaration issued said "we share the view that cooperation and mutual learning through sharing experiences and technologies, capacity building, knowledge and lessons, in particular the development and transfer of environmental friendly technology, is beneficial and should be further promoted.''

    The environment was a key focus of the meeting, which was organized by FEALAC, a group that was launched to promote deeper political understanding and greater economic cooperation between the two regions.

    "We especially noted that the bi-regional trade between East Asia and Latin America has quadrupled, far outpacing the increase of other region-to-region trades in the world," the declaration noted.

    "The Links between the two regions and their people, once described as missing, are getting broader and deeper."

    At the meeting, foreign ministers agreed that ties could be further deepened.

    "We commited ourselves to further strengthening our activities and interactions through the frameworks of FEALAC, in order to make the most of the vast potential in the bi-regional co-operation as well as to jointly tackle major challenges that we face in the world of today and future," the ministers wrote in the declaration.

    The document welcomed the admission of Mongolia as a new memberof the forum.

    Initiated in 1999, the forum is an international framework consisting of 34 countries, including 16 countries in Asia and 18 in Latin America, with the purpose of strengthening cooperative relations in a wide variety of areas between Asia and Latin America.

    Mongolia is taking part in the meeting for the first time along with 15 other Asian nations including China, Japan and South Korea.

    Foreign ministers' meetings are generally held once every two years. The previous Foreign Ministers' Meeting was held in 2007 in Brazil, where it was decided that the 2010 meeting would be held in Japan.

    The foreign ministers' meeting is the highest decision-making framework. There are also senior officials meetings and three working groups of politics, culture and education; economy and society; and science and technology.