SHANGHAI, June 13 (Xinhua) -- The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has ventured into humanistic exchange while the five-year-old regional body expanded its scope of cooperation from security.

Accounting for a quarter of the world's total population, the SCO members are making new achievements in humanistic exchanges.

Although these countries have their own distinctive culture, they have a long tradition of conducting close exchanges and learning from each other, which has in turn boosted their mutual understanding and enhanced their own national culture.

When first founded, the regional group was primarily concerned with such security issues as anti-terrorism and the fight against the "three forces," namely, terrorism, separatism and extremism.

In the ensuing years, the SCO members have made arduous efforts to boost cooperation in economy and trade, developing 127 joint projects and setting up seven working groups for this purpose.

In the meantime, leaders of the six SCO member states repeatedly voiced importance of humanistic cooperation.

Bilateral and multilateral cooperation in culture, education, environmental protection and disaster relief has been going on smoothly among the group's members.

In the ongoing 2006 Russia year in China, the two SCO member countries enhanced their humanistic exchanges by staging over 200 Russian cultural or scientific activities in China.

SCO culture ministers have also agreed on the 2005-2006 multilateral cultural cooperation program following the first SCO culture and art festival in Astana, Kazakhstan during the organization's 2005 summit.

The second SCO culture and art festival will be staged during the 2006 summit in Shanghai, slated for June 15.

At the Astana summit, Chinese President Hu Jintao pledged to train 1,500 specialists in various areas for other members of the SCO, which also groups Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and has Mongolia, Iran, Pakistan and India as observers.

Under other SCO projects, artists from Russia and Central Asian countries have put on a series of performances in China while more and more people in these countries have started to learn the Chinese language and culture. Enditem