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.