The help adds to what the ADB is already doing to help ensure food security in the region.
ISLAMABAD The Asian Development Bank (ADB) said on Tuesday that it plans to give at least $14 billion between 2022 and 2025 as part of a comprehensive programme to help ease a growing food crisis in Asia and the Pacific and improve long-term food security by making food systems more resilient to the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss.
The help adds to the ADB’s already large support for food security in the region, where nearly 1.1 billion people don’t eat well because they are poor and food prices have reached record highs this year.
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The money will go to both new and ongoing projects in areas like farm inputs, food production and distribution, social protection, irrigation, water resource management, and projects that use solutions from nature. ADB will keep putting money into things like energy transition, transportation, access to rural finance, environmental management, health care, and education, all of which are important for food security.
At ADB’s 55th Annual Meeting, ADB President Masatsugu Asakawa said, “This is a timely and urgently needed response to a crisis that is leaving too many poor families in Asia hungry and in deeper poverty.”
“We need to take action now, before the effects of climate change get worse and make it harder for the region to develop.” Our help will be targeted, integrated, and effective. It will help vulnerable people, especially vulnerable women, in the short term and strengthen food systems to lessen the effects of new and future food security risks.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has disrupted the supply of food staples and fertiliser. This puts more stress on a global food system that was already weak from the effects of climate change, supply shocks caused by pandemics, and farming practises that aren’t sustainable.
Some countries in Asia and the Pacific depend on food and fertiliser that are brought in from other places. This makes them vulnerable to food shocks. Even before the invasion of Ukraine, a large number of people in many ADB member countries with low incomes couldn’t afford healthy food.
As well as helping vulnerable people, ADB’s food security assistance will promote open trade, improve smallholder farm production and livelihoods, ease shortages of fertiliser and encourage its efficient use or the use of organic alternatives, support investments in food production and distribution, improve nutrition, and increase climate resilience through integrated and nature-based solutions. One of the main goals will be to protect the natural environment of the region from the effects of climate change and the loss of biodiversity, which have hurt soil, freshwater, and marine ecosystems.
Mr. Asakawa said, “One important part of our long-term plan is to protect natural resources and help farmers and agribusinesses, which produce and distribute a lot of the region’s food, as well as to promote open trade to make sure it gets to consumers quickly.”
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Under the programme, help will begin this year and go on until 2025. It will come from the ADB’s work in both the public and private sectors, and it will try to get an extra $5 billion in food security funding from the private sector.
ADB will use what it learned from helping its members during the global food crisis in 2007 and 2008 and from putting its food security operational plan into action the following year to apply the lessons it has learned. Since then, the ADB has put $2 billion into food security every year. In 2018, ADB put food security at the top of its list of operational priorities.
