To many, Asia is a success story – a region of rapid economic growth and progress. But, although tens of millions have been lifted out of poverty in recent decades, Asia is still home to two-thirds of the worlds poor, British Prime Minister Tony Blair noted in a speech to the Asia 2015 conference in London Monday.
Blair said that by 2015 more than one billion people will be living in desperate poverty in Asia. The struggle now is to sustain growth whilst also managing greater competition for natural resources and greater pressure on the environment.
One other key question is how to distribute wealth more evenly. Even within booming economies like India and China, the wealth gap is widening with many millions still mired in poverty, especially in rural areas.
Blair said global trade was the way to ease Asian poverty while he noted that it was vital to break the “logjam” at World Trade Organization discussions aimed at achieving a global trade treaty.
Pakistans Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz reckoned the three key factors in reducing Asian poverty were “deregulation, liberalization and privatization.”
Aziz also told the Asia 2015 conference that internal conflicts, terrorism and the challenge of securing stocks of energy, water and food posed the biggest threats to the continent’s growth. He said resolving political disputes is also crucial, but that Asia has the potential to serve as a catalyst for a “new world order, based on peace, equity and shared prosperity.”
Some of the speakers at the event, particularly those from South Asia, felt international donors had tended to concentrate more on Africa than Asia, where the demands are equally pressing.
Blair, who spent much of his recent presidency of the Group of Eight industrialized nations championing the cause of Africa, said there is a need for a “new vision and strong leadership to ensure Asias success is sustained.”
According to a report of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific released Monday, Asia has been overlooked by aid donors as it has received far less aid than other regions when compared in terms of size of population, the level of income and the number of poor in the region.
The report, “Achieving the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) in Asia: A Case for More Aid?,” notes that in India, the sub-region with the largest number of poor, underweight children, malnourished people and rural people without access to sanitation, received just about one US dollar (6,20 DKR) per head of official development assistance in 2004. China received a similar amount.
The report showed that these amounts were in complete contrast with those received by Oceania (Stillehavslandene) (190 dollar per head) and the European countries in transition (østeuropa m.fl.) (87 dollar per head), two regions whose share in the world population are negligible and the contributions to the number of the worlds economically and socially poor are relatively small.
At the inaugural session of the conference Finance and Planning Minister M. Saifur Rahman Monday said Bangladesh made significant progress over the past two decades, but that such achievements were not well known outside the country.
He gave credit to the farmers, who have more than doubled food production in the last 30 years, as it also goes to the efforts of successive governments to devise some of the most successful safety net programs around the world.
In a commentary published in The Guardian, Robin Greenwood, head of Christian Aids Asia program writes that organizations with their roots in Asian civil society or global groups with close ties to Asian society have a big part to play in ensuring that poor people get their say in the drive for development.
These organizations need to act as voices for the many, deliver basic services, be first to the scene in crises, stick by communities through thick and thin, and hold to account those who have duties towards Asian communities.
If Asias deepest poverty is to end within a decade, Asian governments, the international community and aid workers need to encourage the most excluded to call the tune. And this calls for new slants on partnership, argues Greenwood.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
