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ADB seeks action to secure food supplies as funding battle looms

ADB president Haruhiko Kuroda called yesterday for determined action to secure food supplies for Asia's poorest people as a battle brewed among the bank's backers over how to fund a growing crop of projects.

  • Reuters
  • Published: 00:11 May 6, 2008
  • Gulf News

Madrid: ADB president Haruhiko Kuroda called yesterday for determined action to secure food supplies for Asia's poorest people as a battle brewed among the bank's backers over how to fund a growing crop of projects.

"The global fight against poverty will be won or lost in our region," Kuroda said in a keynote speech at the Asian Development Bank's annual meeting.

"Soaring food prices are hitting the poor very hard. This price surge has a stark human dimension and has greatly affected over a billion people in Asia and the Pacific alone," he said.

Citing grain stocks at their lowest levels in decades, turmoil in global financial markets and an uncertain outlook for the world economy, Kuroda made a plea for "money and ideas" to boost development and rescue millions of people from poverty.

But the call for action is accompanied by a need to rapidly accelerate the ADB's investment programme, particularly its core portfolio of infrastructure project lending, funded by loans linked to market interest rates.

Sources inside the ADB say that to meet the soaring demand for assistance, the Bank must substantially increase its capital base from its current $56 billion.

If it doesn't, the ADB's core non-concessional lending activity - some $8.2 billion of the $10.1 billion it invested in total in 2007 - risks being slashed.

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