The Asian Development Bank (ADB) announced Saturday it would provide immediate budgetary support to some Asia-Pacific countries hit hardest by rising food prices.

High and rising food prices "threaten to undermine Asia's effort to fight against poverty and achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015," ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda told reporters ahead of an annual meeting of the Manila-based bank, which kicked off here Saturday.

Over a billion people in the Asia-Pacific region are seriously affected by the food price surge as food expenditure accounts for 60 percent of the total expenditure basket. Food and energy together account for more than 75 percent of total spending of the poor in the region.

Rising food prices, together with record-high fuel costs, have placed many governments in the region under significant pressure to put food on the tables of the poor and vulnerable. They have provided generous subsidies, imposed price controls, and banned exports to keep food and grain prices in check.

"We believe targeted interventions to protect food entitlements of the most vulnerable and poor are more effective to mitigate the immediate impact of rising food prices," said Kuroda.

Kuroda said the ADB would provide immediate budgetary support to the hardest-hit countries to alleviate their fiscal burdens and cushion the blow of rising food prices on the poor.

In the short run, the ADB would closely work with the affected governments in the region to strengthen safety net programs for food-stressed populations and emergency food security reserves systems.

Kuroda said in the medium to long run, governments need to step up investment, boost rural infrastructure and strengthen institutions to sustain higher farm output.

"We are working closely with our development partners to respond to the crisis in line with our comparative advantages and resource availability," he said.

The four-day annual meeting of the ADB was expected to be largely devoted to the issue of rising food prices as analysis showed global agricultural commodity prices have been up over 8 percent so far this year, after a 41-percent rise in 2007.

Amid worldwide economic slowdown, rising food prices could not only constrain economic growth by stoking inflation, but also threaten social stability.

(Xinhua News Agency May 4, 2008)