India's finance minister said on Monday he was considering a blanket ban on trading in food futures, underlying growing concerns in Asia over the role of hedge funds and financial market traders in the recent surge in commodities prices.

If India imposes a ban, it would come only five years after the country introduced such futures trading as part of a broader push to develop India as a leading financial centre.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Asian Development Bank annual meeting in Madrid, P. Chidambaram said his worries over market speculation were shared by governments across the region and that India was "facing a very grave crisis on the food front".

The surge in the cost of basic staples has sparked some social unrest in Asian countries such as China and Indonesia. It has also fuelled inflation to the point that it is now threatening to dent the spectacular economic progress of countries such as Vietnam and China.

In his keynote address to the ADB annual meeting, Haruhiko Kuroda, the bank's Japanese president, on Monday called for determined action to secure food supplies for Asia's poorest people, according to Reuters. The region houses two-thirds of the world's poor.

"The global fight against poverty will be won or lost in our region," Mr Kuroda told delegates. "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.

Mr Kuroda said "money and ideas" were needed to boost development and called for the ADB's current $56bn capital base to be increased to fund more loans.

"The absence of such measures could seriously undermine the global fight against poverty and erode the gains of past decades," Mr Kuroda said.

Trading activities are also coming under fire from governments in energy-hungry Asian countries that are dependent on oil imports. "It is the big speculators that have taken the oil price to a level that is unacceptable and they just want to ruin the developing countries," said Ishaq Dar, Pakistan's new finance minister. "The price of oil and food should remain within reasonable limits. These are commodities that could massively hurt the developing countries."

The attacks on food and oil speculators echo some of the criticism voiced by governments in 1997, when much of Asia plunged into financial crisis.

In a sign that Asia is seeking to reduce its exposure to sudden capital outflows that could trigger a repeat of the crisis a decade ago, Asian finance ministers at the weekend agreed to turn about $80bn of existing bilateral currency swaps into a common facility that could be used for emergency funding.

The agreement was described by a senior Japanese finance ministry official as an "incremental but significant" advance towards turning the so-called Chiang Mai Initiative into the foundations for an autonomous Asian monetary fund. Japan has been the driving force behind this initiative, after the International Monetary Fund and the US shot down its proposal to create an Asian fund at the time of the 1997 crisis.

Asian countries are trying to coordinate more closely their food policies and overcome distribution hurdles. However, such problems were highlighted yesterday when the Philippines failed to attract offers for 675,000 tonnes of rice during an auction in Manila.

Furthermore, Asian countries diverge in their food needs as well as agriculture policies. For instance, Malaysia and Indonesia have been leading production of palm oil that can be converted into biofuel, Mr Chidambaram said on Monday that "food being converted into biofuels is the single biggest reason why we are facing this crisis." He added: "To put mildly, [the conversion of land for biofuels] is foolish, to put it strongly it is a crime against humanity."