The Asian Development Bank (ADB) announced earlier this week a new poverty reduction strategy, which aims to help eradicate extreme poverty in Asia and the Pacific.

With emphasis on economic growth in earlier years, the ADB, a multilateral development bank, financed Asia's urgent need for physical infrastructure, such as electricity, roads, irrigation systems, school buildings and health centers.

But now, the Manila-based bank will shift its focus from assisting its members in economic growth to poverty reduction, because millions of Asians are surviving on less than 1 US dollar a day.

The ADB's move reflected the urgency of poverty reduction in the region, economists said.

Over the past three decades, Asia's economic growth has significantly reduced the proportion of people in extreme poverty. According to an ADB study, the proportion of people in poverty in China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan declined from 25 percent in 1985 to 21 percent in 1998.

However, close to 900 million of the world's poor live in Asia and nearly one in three Asians is poor, the study says.

"Despite the development gains of the past few decades, Asia is still home to 900 million extremely poor people. This is unacceptable. Public policy and action can change this and we are refocusing our work with the single, over-arching goal of eliminating poverty from the region," said Tadao Chino, president of the ADB, when announcing the bank's new poverty reduction strategy Tuesday.

Chino said his bank, which finances roughly 6 billion dollars worth of projects and programs yearly, will readjust its project focus. At least 40 percent of all public sector lending will be poverty interventions, he said.

"Future projects will have to show that they directly or indirectly benefit large numbers of very poor people," said ADB Vice President Peter Sullivan, who prepared the bank's new strategy. "This means we'll be doing more farm-to-market roads and fewer expressways, more rural electrification projects and fewer big power plants, more rural electrification projects and fewer big power plants."

Why the number of poor people has kept increasing in Asia despite the fast economic development in the past decades?

Population growth is adding to the absolute number of the poor, experts said.

Although the proportion of people in poverty in China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan declined from 25 percent to 21 percent in the past 13 years, their population increased by 25 percent, from 2.162 billion to 2.71 billion. As a consequence, the number of people in poverty in the five countries rose from 549 million to 572 million.

Thus, the war against poverty in percentage has won, but not so in numbers, experts said.

Moreover, the Asian financial crisis has reversed decades of development in some countries, making the poverty reduction task even tougher, analysts said.

Until recently, trends in poverty reduction in the region had been positive, especially in East and Southeast Asia. However, since the financial crisis in 1997, declines in the gross domestic product of the economies in the region have stalled progress. In Southeast Asia alone, more than 10 million people have joined the ranks of the poor in the wake of the crisis.

Besides, many people in the Central Asian countries have slipped into poverty with the economic disruptions of transition. The small island countries in the Pacific remain vulnerable because they are remote, prone to natural disasters, and have limited ability to deal with external economic shocks.

As the number of the poor is still increasing in Asia, experts are learning lessons from poverty reduction efforts in the past and studying the best way to eradicate extreme poverty in the region.

"While sustained economic growth is clearly the only viable engine driving poverty reduction, experience shows that the rising tide does not lift all boats equally. Some let in water and some are fully stuck in the mud," Jean-Michel Severino, vice president for the East Asia and Pacific region of the World Bank, said Tuesday at the opening of a four-day "Manila Social Forum," which looks for ways to resolve social policy issues.

He proposed more investment in education and the establishment of a social safety net for the poor, because "rapid growth cannot be the primary safety net, provider of jobs and income security (for the poor) in the future."

With its new strategy, the ADB will concentrate on the rural and social sectors as the great majority of the poor live in the countryside. The bank will also invest more to provide the poor, especially women, with access to essential services, such as health and education.

"These investments are often the most effective way to break the cycle of poverty," said an ADB statement issued earlier this week.

But experts said the Asian countries most seriously affected by the economic crisis will have to spend the first years of the coming millennium trying to return to their pre-crisis levels of poverty incidence.