"The global fight against poverty will be won or lost in our region,' Kuroda said in a keynote speech to delegates 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. 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 . 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. "The absence of such measures could seriously undermine the global fight against poverty and erode the gains of the past decades,' Kuroda said. 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