A billion Asians require assistance to weather the effects of the soaring price of food around the globe, the head of the Asian Development Bank said Monday.

Haruhiko Kuroda, the bank's president, said an erosion of purchasing power has put Asia's poor at risk of hunger and malnutrition and could “seriously undermine the global fight against poverty and erode the gains of the past decades.”

"This price surge has a stark human dimension and has greatly affected over a billion people in Asia and the Pacific alone,” Kuroda said as the bank opened its two-day annual meeting in Madrid.

The price of basic staples has increased dramatically in the past three years, spurred by poor harvests, increased use of biofuels, fuel costs and surging demand for food-grains in China and other emerging economies.

More than 1.7 billion Asians — three times the population of Europe — live each day on less than $2 US, the bank said in a statement. Meanwhile, the poorest of the region cope with the effects of an infrastructure investment gap of about $300 billion a year, it said.

Last month, the United Nations announced it would set up a high-level task force headed by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to tackle the global food crisis that is threatening to destabilize developing nations.

Ban said UN leaders will take a series of medium- and long-term measures, with the first priority the $755-million US funding shortfall for the World Food Program, much of it because of soaring world grain prices.

OPEC-like 'rice cartel' proposed

Kuroda's remarks came as officials of four rice-exporting countries — Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Burma — prepared to meet Tuesday to discuss a Thai proposal to create a cartel to control prices of the staple grain.

Markets indicate the price of standard Thai rice has tripled in the last year.

The soaring cost of rice and other developing world staples has already led to riots in impoverished Haiti and export bans by India, Thailand, Vietnam and other major rice-producing countries to ensure domestic supplies.

But Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said Monday that unlike the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the group known as OPEC, the purpose of the rice cartel would be to ensure stability of the rice market rather than raise prices.

He said cartel members would address food shortages both regionally and around the world, and have no intention of hoarding or using their power to drive up prices.

"We shall not hoard [rice] and raise prices when there are shortages," Hun Sen said.

But representatives from the Philippines said they weren't convinced.

Edgardo Angara, chairman of the Philippine Senate's committee on agriculture, said he fears a small group of producers could control the staple food and price it out of reach for "millions and millions of people."

"It is a bad idea … It will create an oligopoly and it's against humanity," Angara said Friday.

With files from the Associated Press