Pranab to attend ADB annual meet in Hanoi

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee will leave for the Vietnamese capital Hanoi on Tuesday to attend ADB's 44th annual meeting during which Ministers of several countries including France and Japan will deliberate on ways to deal with rising food and fuel prices.

The annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank is being held at a time when the sky rocketing commodity and fuel prices is threatening to push more and more people below poverty.

Besides Mukherjee, French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde and her Japanese counterpart Yoshihiko Noda are also scheduled to join ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda and the IMF's Deputy Managing Director Naoyuki Shinohara in the deliberations.

In all about 3,000 leaders, experts and officials from governments, the private sector, academia, media and civil society are expected to participate in the four-day annual conference of the ADB beginning May 3.

In addition to bilateral meetings with his counterparts from other important nations, Mukherjee will participate at a Governor's Seminar on "Asia 2050: Pursuit of growth, sustainability and well being".

This seminar will discuss the initial findings of the "Asia 2050" study and focus on some of the key issues like sustaining rapid growth, demographic challenges and food security.

The ADB conference is being held at a time when inflation has become a major issue in the Asian region.
     
According to an ADB report, rising prices are hurting 2 billion people who are living on less than $2 a day, thereby complicating economic and monetary policy.
     
Moreover, floods and earthquakes in the region have added to the pressure.
     
The other important issues that will be deliberated at the conference are environmental degradation and climate change, growing and ageing population and global economic rebalancing.
     
The 44th meeting of the ADB's Board of Governors will assess immediate and long-term hurdles with ministers and senior government officials, business leaders, fellow international financial institutions, and civil society representatives.
     
Asia and the Pacific now accounts for around a quarter of global economic output but this could soar to around 50 per cent by 2050.
     
By then, the region will account for over half the world's population which will be increasingly flooding into the region's cities, using an ever-larger portion of the world's finite resources and generating a bigger carbon footprint.