600M Asians exist on US$1 a day despite economic growth, says ADB

MANILA (AP) - Although Asia has achieved unprecedented economic growth in the last three decades, hunger and poverty persist, with 600 million people living on less than US$1 a day, the Asian Development Bank said Thursday.

New approaches are needed to uplift the region's poorest, who are concentrated in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihood, the bank said in a statement at the start of a two-day conference organized with the International Food Policy Research Institute.

"Millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, but millions more remain, particularly in rural areas," said Joachim von Braun, director general of the research institute.

About 600 million people, or 15 percent of Asia's 4 billion population, still live on the poverty line, or on US$1 a day, the bank said.

"New approaches to promote agricultural and rural growth, along with innovative social protection measures, are needed to help the poor who have been left behind," von Braun said.

By 2015, the region will still be home to half the world's poor, and best projections indicate that three-quarters of them will live in rural areas. At the same time, Asia is projected to contribute nearly half the world's gross domestic product, the ADB said.

"Ironically, East Asia's remarkable economic growth, which was built upon strong agricultural gains, is now contributing to expanding income inequalities between those living in cities and those in rural areas," ADB Vice President C. Lawrence Greenwood said. "This growing gap is not economically or politically sustainable over time."

Braun said accelerating rural employment is one of the key ways to cut poverty, achievable through innovations in technology and institutions.

New strategies are essential to address emerging challenges, including the rapidly changing global goods market for high-value foods like fruits, vegetables, and dairy products; the potential offered by biofuel production; and the growing importance of non-farming activities as income sources for the rural poor, the ADB statement added.

Greenwood said in the coming years, the bank plans to raise assistance to the agriculture and natural resources sector, for which ADB lending topped US$800 million in 2006, up from less than US$200 million in 2003.