By Xinhua,
Madrid : The Asian Development Bank (ADB) concluded an annual meeting here Tuesday by providing 500 million U.S. dollars in emergency aid to tackle rising food costs in Asia-Pacific region.
“I am pleased to announce that ADB will provide 500 million U.S. dollars as immediate budgetary support to the hardest hit countries so that they can bring food to the tables of the vulnerable, poor and needy,” ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda told reporters after a four-day gathering of the Manila-based bank.
“This money will be made available to there countries to cushion the impact of rising fiscal burden due to rising food prices,” he added.
But Kuroda declined to name possible recipient countries and the amount each can get.
“I can say that a few countries requested and showed interest in getting such kind of immediate budgetary support from ADB. We are engaging discussions and negotiations with those governments,” he said, adding a decision would come out in weeks since the situation is urgent.
The total amount of the emergency aid was declared after the ADB ended up a four-day annual meeting here, which brought thousands of leaders of government, people from the private sector, academy and civil society together amid food price surge.
Rising food prices, together with record-high fuel costs, have placed many governments in the Asia-Pacific region under significant pressure to feed the poor and vulnerable.
More than 1 billion people in the region are seriously impacted by the food price surge as food expenditure accounts for 60 percent of total expenditure in the region, home to two-thirds of the world’s poor with 1.5 billion people, three times the population of Europe, living on less than two U.S. dollars a day.
The ADB warned at the annual meeting that rising food prices would undermine its efforts to fight poverty, the mission of the bank. It announced the provision of emergency aid on the first day of the meeting but without giving amount.
“Rising prices of basic commodities adversely affect the real incomes of poor households, putting progress on poverty reduction and social cohesion at risk. This demands early responses,” Kuroda said in the closing remarks.
The Japanese ADB chief urged governments to implement well designed and well-targeted programs for the poorest and most vulnerable groups, as well as policies to support open commerce and availability of basic commodities across the region.
In addition, medium to long-term measures, which may be more important, are needed to improve agriculture productivity and modernize the rural economy, including increased investment in research, rural infrastructure and rural finance, he said.
Kuroda said the ADB was also ready to scale up its spending in the agricultural sector in the coming years.
“In 2008, ADB is already planning to lend 1 billion U.S. dollars to the agricultural and natural sector and will double its lending to the sector to over 2 billion U.S. dollars in 2009,” he said.
On the eve of the annual meeting, the ADB secured 11.3 billion U.S. dollars of donation for its development fund to fight poverty in the Asia-Pacific region during the next four years.
Established in 1966, the ADB is an international development finance institution tasked to help its developing members reduce poverty and improve the quality of life of their people.
It is owned and financed by 67 members, of which 48 are from the region and 19 are from other parts of the globe, including Spain.