ADB readies emergency food aid loans to Asia: Kuroda
Tue May 6, 5:35 AM ET
MADRID (Reuters) - The ADB is set to make loans worth hundreds of
millions of dollars to several Asian nations which have asked for
emergency budget assistance to combat soaring food prices, ADB
President Haruhiko Kuroda said on Tuesday.
"A few countries have expressed their wish to seek some financial
assistance from ADB," Kuroda told Reuters in an interview on the
sidelines of the Asian Development Bank's annual meeting in Madrid,
confirming for the first time that the Manila-based lender had
received formal requests for cash.
"Negotiations are going on. The amount will be hundreds of millions of
U.S. dollars," said Kuroda, who declined to give details of either the
governments concerned or the exact sums requested.
"They are pretty big, populous countries."
The ADB on Saturday unveiled its plan to provide emergency financial
assistance to the poorest Asian nations hardest hit by spiraling food
prices.
The plan was contained in a detailed 15 page report which highlighted
several nations as suffering particularly from large increases in
imported food prices, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Sri
Lanka and the Philippines.
The ADB estimates that one billion people in the Asia Pacific region
who live on less than $2 a day are at risk of sliding back into hunger
and malnutrition, undoing decades of hard work that have lifted
hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty since the 1960s.
Asia is home to two thirds of the world's poor and risks rising social
tension as a doubling of wheat and rice prices in the last year has
slammed people who spend more than half their income on food.
|
