The Asian Development Bank, under pressure to overhaul its operations, opened its annual meeting Friday to warnings of growing wealth inequalities, economic imbalances and pollution in the region.
Development experts gathered for a four-day meeting to try to tackle a growing rich-poor gap and alleviate chronic pollution in much of developing Asia, which is enjoying rapid but increasingly uneven economic growth.
"Despite much progress, the gap between the rich and the poor is widening with hundreds of millions still living in poverty," ADB president Haruhiko Kuroda told reporters at a conference centre in a leafy Kyoto suburb where a handful of protestors gathered outside waving placards saying, "ADB Go Home."
The ADB also came under attack from non-governmental campaigns led by Greenpeace which slammed the development bank's financing of coal-fired power projects in Asia that it said was contributing to global climate change.
The ADB said it would invest 900 million dollars in clean energy projects in 2007 and slightly more in the following two years, with the priority on China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Vietnam. But environmentalists said that a large portion of the ADB's energy financing was still being channelled into smoke-belching fossil-fuelled power.
"The bank must end the obvious contradiction of saying they want to fight climate change, while supporting coal, the most climate-damaging of energy technologies," Greenpeace's Athena Ballesteros said in a statement.
The future of the Asian Development Bank itself is also under discussion as the lender comes under pressure to modernise its operations to ensure it does not lose its relevance in a rapidly shifting economic landscape.
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