Former Speaker Jose de Venecia will ask Asia’s political leaders attending the First All Parties Anti-Poverty Summit in China to take a united stand in urging international lending agencies to create an Asian Micro-Finance Fund and an Asian Anti-Poverty Fund for millions of poor urban and rural families in the region.

De Venecia, founding chairman of the International Conference of Asian Political Parties, was invited as one of the speakers in the seven-day convention of leading ruling and opposition parties held in Kunming and in Beijing, China.

China’s Communist Party international minister Wang Jiarui is among invited speakers.

Leaders of various political parties in the Philippines, including the ruling Liberal Party, are expected to attend the conference which would tackle various measures that participating political groups might pursue in addressing the worsening poverty situation in many countries, including the Philippines.

Before his departure for China, De Venecia said he will bat for the creation of the two financial packages that would help Asian families living below the poverty line to have access to credit in order to improve their conditions.

De Venecia pointed out that World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the International Finance Corporation, the Asian Development bank, the world’s commercial banks, and the large Sovereign Funds generally finance or invest in “Big Ticket” items or lend only to governments, to the neglect of small farmers, fisher folks and small entrepreneurs who need funding of as low as $100 to $5,000.

The former Pangasinan representative will be joining the four-day field trips and meetings in Yunman province and Kunming City to observe China’s successful model in battling poverty.

De Venecia said the China example resulted in ameliorating the status of at least 300 million poverty-stricken Chinese largely in China’s eastern seaboard.

It was through the efforts of De Venecia and the ICAPP that the anti-poverty meetings were proposed.

He vouched the idea at the sidelines of the Beijing Olympics two years ago with Chinese Minister Liu Yanshan of the Great Hall of People. Also present then were Vice Ministers Ai Ping and Liu Hongcai, now Chinese ambassador to North Korea.

De Venecia noted that in Latin America, governments keep children from poorest families in school through school-feeding programs and “wages for learning” paid to older potential dropouts.

These anti-poverty programs are now beginning to be widely adopted in Asia. Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the Philippines have already developed variations of the Latin-American model “invented” in Mexico, he said.

As a further feature to his two proposals, De Venecia suggested the creation of a state-supported Asian Agri-business Crops Insurance Program to help the tens of millions of farmers and fishermen in the Asian region including the poorest cooperatives to recover some of the devastating losses that may be incurred by their small businesses in the farms, fisheries, riversides and coastal areas when they are struck by floods, storms, drought, or earthquakes.

He said since 2000 all governments committed at the United Nations to achieve the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and reduce poverty by 50 percent by 2015.

“We are now in 2010 and we are seeing even some deterioration because of the ongoing wars, the hundreds of thousands of refugees, the global financial crisis, large-scale corruption, the ravages of climate change, and the continuing tragedy of a number of failed states”, the veteran lawmaker said.