World Bank will provide 130 million U.S. dollars to help Bangladesh respond to food crisis and especially to benefit poor families affected by high food prices.

The financing is designed to ease the pressure on Bangladesh's current budget which is staggering from expansion of food-related spending including social protection programs.

The Food Crisis Development Support Credit Project, approved Tuesday by the World Bank, is part of the bank's fast-track Global Food Response Program (GFRP), a release of the World Bank said Thursday.

World Bank Country Director for Bangladesh Xian Zhu was quoted by the release as saying that the spike in food prices, compounded by rising prices of other commodities, has pushed over 4 million Bangladeshis back into poverty.

He said this credit will help reduce the pressure on the budget and ensure continuation of the government's social protection programs, designed to help the poorest people deal with rising food costs.

According to a World Bank statistics the food price shock has increased Bangladesh's poverty rate by around 3 percentage points. It also found that nearly 8 percent of the surveyed households pulled their children out of schools to get jobs to help their families cope with the crisis. In addition, many poor households have cut their food intake.

The Bangladeshi government has allocated 800 million U.S. dollars in its fiscal 2008-09 (from July 2008 to June 2009) budget to deal with this crisis. These measures include making food grain, particularly rice, available to poor people at subsidized prices, setting up a new employment guarantee scheme to help people in poor areas, and increasing the country's strategic food reserves.

(Xinhua News Agency October 30, 2008)