Cambodia's poverty rate reduced over the last decade, but it needs to be significantly accelerated, a report of the World Bank said on Thursday.

A new report on Cambodia Poverty Assessment 2006 by the World Bank praises the number of successes made by Cambodia over the last decade in reducing poverty.

The findings of the report have been discussed by government officials and donors at a meeting today in Phnom Penh.

The report is based on the Ministry of Planning's socioeconomic survey of 15,000 people that was released in November. The report shows that over the period from 1993 to 2004, with growth running at 7 percent a year, the proportion of the population below the poverty line fell from 47 to 35 percent.

"The new Poverty Assessment finds that in the past decade, Cambodia has made significant progress in reducing poverty," said Nisha Agrawal, country manager of World Bank at the conference to launch the report. "Poverty has fallen in the countryside as well as in the towns, though progress has been more rapid in urban areas."

Meanwhile, the World Bank urged the government to faster poverty reduction in next decade. "Looking ahead of the next decade, the challenge for Cambodia is not only to sustain the rate of poverty reduction seen over the last decade, but to significantly accelerate it," Nisha Agrawal said.

"Instead of lifting roughly one percent of the population out of poverty every year, which is what happened during last decade, is it possible for Cambodia to lift two or three percent of its population out of poverty every year, like some of its neighbors are doing?" he said.

The report offers some suggestions of what is needed to ensure a better distribution of income and wealth, leading to faster poverty reduction in Cambodia. The main message is that since the poor rely mainly on agriculture for their livelihoods, in the coming decade, Cambodia will need to create an additional engine of growth--namely, a more vibrant agricultural sector, instead of relying only on its more traditional engines of growth-the garments and tourism sectors alone.

The report argues that Cambodia has the potential to achieve and surpass its poverty reduction goals, but this will require some significant changes in policies and programs to address some key challenges.

If industry and services were to grow by 10 percent per annum, while agriculture continued to average only 2.5 percent per annum, Cambodia would not meet the UN target of halving poverty by 2015, the report maintained.

Source: Xinhua