JAKARTA, Aug. 5 (Xinhua) -- Asia must reduce dependence on export to traditional markets such as the United States and Europe and shift to domestic consumption as well as looking for new markets, a UN official said in an exclusive interview with Xinhuarecently.

Ajay Chhibber, the United Nations assistant secretary-general and director of the U.N. Development Program's Regional Bureau for the Asia-Pacific, said that the recent world financial crisis showed Asian countries' excessive dependence on export to the traditional markets would not be possible anymore in the future.

"It is because that debt level in the consuming countries, mainly the U.S. and Europe, is very high so that we could not expect their demand to persist. Selling to only the U.S, Europe or Japan may not be the only solution," he said.

Chhibber said that conditions in those countries would not be the same anymore as they were in their glorious era.

"Now, those countries have to adjust to the fact that they could not borrow and spend as they have been spending (all these years)," he said.