The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is extending a total of $100 million in fresh loans for a project intended to improve the lives and incomes of over 150,000 poor farmers in the southern Philippines, the Manila-based lender said Monday.

The project or the Agrarian Reform Communities Project II will embrace six provinces in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao that have high levels of poverty.

"The ARCP II will build on the momentum created by the success of ARCP, approved in 1998, which assisted 165 agrarian reform communities in 35 provinces," said ADB.

The multilateral lender will provide funding of $70 million from its ordinary capital resources (OCR) and $30 million from the OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID), which it administers. The Philippine government and its local units will also chip in some $108 million, according to ADB.

ADB's OCR loan will have a 25-year repayment period, including a grace period of five years, and an interest rate based on the ADB London interbank offered rate-based lending facility. The OFID loan, on the other hand, will have a 20-year maturity, with a five-year grace period, a 1-percent service charge and a 3-percent interest rate.

Under the new project, farmers will be trained to participate in infrastructure programs and agribusiness activities will be enhanced to support beneficiaries of the government's Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program or CARP, which redistributes land among farmers and helps them become market-oriented producers.

The project will target capacity building for organizations of agrarian reform, improve rural infrastructure and distribution networks, including farm-to-market roads, bridges, small-scale irrigation systems, post-harvest facilities, and widen the access of target communities to social infrastructure such as potable water supply systems and other community facilities.

It will likewise provide technology and extension support to assist farmers boost the productivity of their crops as well as partner with micro-finance institutions and nongovernment organizations to develop new agri-enterprises and markets.

"The project will substantially expand the rural production base by assisting the poor to break out of subsistence farming, to diversify their livelihood activities, to raise production and distribution efficiencies, to improve their market position, and to provide employment opportunities for landless households," said Manoshi Mitra, senior social development specialist at ADB's Southeast Asia Department.

Around a third of the project's target beneficiaries are expected to be lifted out of poverty, Mitra added.