[Asia] `Poverty may be eradicated in Asia in next generation`

From The Business Standard

Despite facing huge challenges, Asia may eradicate poverty in the next generation if the current growth is continued, Britain’s Department for International Development has claimed.

The department, in collaboration with the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, has convened a two-day conference here on March 6 and 7 to focus attention on building new forms of partnership to eradicate poverty in Asia.

According to DFID, Asia has raised more people out of poverty than any other region at any time in history. Growth has been strong, and though currently two out of three of the world’s poorest people live in Asia, by 2015 this could fall to one in three if current trends continue.

“With continued efforts, it is possible to eradicate poverty in Asia. Yet almost 1.1 billion people still live on less than $1 a day.”

Asia faces huge challenges in nutrition, health, education, social exclusion, water and sanitation and

The conference, ‘Asia 2015: promoting growth, ending poverty’, will bring together high-level international figures, including ministers of finance and planning and officials from across Asia, as well as influential figures from civil society and the private sector, to discuss the changing face of development in Asia over the next decade.

The aim of the two-day event is to agree how Asian countries, together with development agencies and the international community, will meet the remaining millennium development goals. Rapid growth in Asia has and will continue to have an enormous impact on the global economy.

Markets such as China and India are undergoing tremendous economic and social development. Trade within the continent is growing at nearly three times the global rate and Asia’s share of world exports rose from 23 per cent in 1985 to 38 per cent in 2002.

The conference will raise the profile of both development challenges and opportunities and offers a platform for Asian countries to present and talk about their own experiences and perspectives.

The Secretary of State for International Development, Hilary Benn, MP, said: “the world has a lot to learn from Asia’s development successes — not only South Korea, Thailand and Malaysia, but, more recently, in China, India and Vietnam. But Asia still faces many major challenges which need the world’s support. Like a silent tsunami, poverty kills through diseases, increasing the likelihood of mothers dying in pregnancy and childbirth and malnutrition, all of which we can prevent. If the global community addresses such challenges now, in a generation, poverty eradication in Asia could be one of the world’s great success stories.”