Food Summit To Help Developing Countries

from the Voice of America

By Douglas Mpuga

Delegates to the UN World Food Crisis Summit in Rome have promised more help for developing countries. The summit was convened by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to deal with the problem of soaring food prices.

One of the delegates was Simon Maxwell, the director for the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Britain’s leading independent think tank on international development and humanitarian issues. He told VOA from London that the summit exceeded expectations.

“Our expectations were not so high because there was always a risk that (President) Robert Mugabe would derail the summit or the UN agencies would end up quarrelling. But in the end they didnt do a bad job.”

Maxwell said the United Nations produced more money and showed that UN agencies can work well together. “They kept the issue on the agenda and that is important because they now pass the flag to the G8 (summit of the Group of 8 industrialized countries), which meets in Japan in a month or so.”

He noted that the food crisis is certainly urgent, although food prices had come down a little bit since the peak in March. He added, “But we know poverty reduction efforts have been put back as much as seven years by the increase in food prices. There have been riots in more than 30 countries. People are suffering as a result of these high prices so we need to make sure we have the right measures in place.”

Maxwell said that includes making sure there is good social protection, a safety net for people who are affected in the short run and investment in agriculture so there will be enough food in the future.

He addressed the concern that food subsidies in the developed world have contributed to soaring high prices in the developing countries: “I don’t think food subsidies have made much difference to the current food crisis. And even if the subsidies were taken away, the price of wheat and rice would only go up a little bit compared to the price rises weve seen,” he said.

'Obscene': Mugabe's arrival at food summit provokes outrage

from the Independent

He inflicted starvation on his nation. Now Mugabe has arrived in Europe for a UN summit to tackle the global food crisis

By Peter Popham in Rome, Anne Penketh and Colin Brown

He's turned up again like a bad penny. President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is back in Rome, staying in five-star accommodation for the duration of a United Nations food summit while his people starve as a result of his disastrous farm policies.

The unexpected arrival of President Mugabe and his shopaholic wife, Grace, prompted a flood of international protests yesterday after he joined more than 60 world leaders flying in for the three-day conference. Although the Zimbabwean leader and his wife are targeted by an European Union travel ban, the sanctions do not apply to UN meetings conducted on UN premises.

The grotesque irony of the situation was lost on no one. "Robert Mugabe going to Rome for the food summit is like Pol Pot going to a human rights convention," said Lord Malloch-Brown, the Foreign Office minister for Africa, referring to the mastermind of the Cambodian genocide.

The British representative to the meeting, Douglas Alexander, the International Development Secretary, said Mr Mugabe's appearance was "obscene".

"This meeting is supposed to be about increasing the supply of food," Mr Alexander told BBC Radio, "while his policies have exactly the reverse effect in Zimbabwe." His presence in Rome was "an affront to all Zimbabweans who are suffering hunger, destitution and poverty as a direct result of his rule". That view was echoed by representatives from the United States, Australia and the Netherlands.

After last month's disputed elections, Zimbabwe's crisis is more desperate than ever. Death squads haunt the land: as reported on The Independent's front page yesterday, the tortured and broken body of one of Mr Mugabe's most courageous opponents, Tonderai Ndira, was found weeks after he had been dragged from his home in his underwear. In recent months, tens of thousands of Zimbabweans have fled abroad to escape the hunger, violence and desperate poverty of their homeland, where inflation is running at 165,000 per cent.

Today the Mugabes can get away from all that. They are staying in the reassuringly luxurious surroundings of the Via Veneto, this time at the Ambasciatori Palace Hotel Rome, which describes itself as "deep inside 'La Dolce Vita'", and where the room rates range from €210 (£170) to €900 per night. Grace Mugabe will not have to go far to indulge in one of her shopping sprees: the world's most refined and expensive bags and shoes are all a short trundle from the hotel.

In 2002, he was here with his wife and an entourage of 10, staying at the five-star Hotel Excelsior. In 2005, he flew in for the funeral of Pope John Paul II, and trapped the Prince of Wales into a handshake. Now he is here again, for the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation's (FAO) summit on world food security, climate change and bioenergy, to the embarrassment of the organisers and many participants, thumbing his nose at the rest of the world less than a month before the 84-year old faces his first ever run-off presidential election.

An FAO spokesman said the UN can exercise no influence over who a given member state chooses to represent it at the meeting, "nor should it". He said that 185 of the UN's 191 members will be represented, "and who they choose to represent them is entirely their business". The Mugabes will not even have to put their hands in their pockets: the UN has set up a trust fund to pay an allowance for the delegations from poorer countries.

Mr Alexander said he condemned Mr Mugabe's presence at the summit and would neither meet him nor shake his hand. However, there are calls for the cabinet minister to boycott the meeting altogether, after Gordon Brown refused to attend December's EU-Africa summit over Mr Mugabe's presence in Lisbon.

Some Labour MPs tabled a Commons protest motion calling for Mr Alexander to stay away and criticised ministers for double standards on Zimbabwe. Harry Cohen said: "It's unbelievable that Douglas Alexander should turn up at the same conference as Robert Mugabe after the boycott by Gordon Brown. There is a total lack of consistency and double standards by the Government." He warned: "Mugabe is facing elections and is going to play this for all it is worth ... Douglas Alexander is playing into his hands. And it will do no favours for the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai."

The calls for a boycott were supported by Ian Gibson, the former Labour chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, who said it was "shocking" that Mr Mugabe should be attending a conference on food shortages when he had wrecked the food economy of his own country.

"I don't think Mugabe will listen to a word a British minister says," said Mr Gibson. "Douglas Alexander should take his lead from Gordon Brown and stay away." But Mr Brown's official spokesman insisted last night that the minister would attend the UN meeting as planned.

The Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ensured that he will receive an equally frosty welcome from Western leaders when he arrives tonight. He told foreign guests in Tehran yesterday marking the 19th anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that "the criminal and terrorist Zionist regime [Israel]... will soon disappear off the geographical scene".

But last night it was Mr Mugabe's moment in the limelight. If anything, he will have been amused to learn that – as reported on Channel 4 News last night – Britain has taken the first step towards stripping him of the honorary knighthood awarded in 1994.

Food summit haggles over hunger declaration

from Reuters Africa

By Robin Pomeroy

ROME - Political squabbling put a U.N. summit on the global food crisis at risk of closing on Thursday without a powerful declaration on how to stop millions more people going hungry.

"The food crisis which the world faces today is so serious that it would be disastrous for the survival of mankind if the conclusions reached suffer the same fate at this historic summit," said Ghana's President John Kufuor in speech delivered by an aide.

Delegates from 151 countries at the Rome talks, which began with speeches from 44 leaders on Tuesday, missed their Wednesday deadline for agreeing a final statement about "eliminating hunger and securing food for all".

"They will look at a new draft which they can either approve, try to amend or, in the worst case, reject," said a U.N. official as the last day of the meeting began.

The issue putting the talks at risk was not the most contentious debate -- biofuels, which anti-hunger campaigners say diverts food from mouths into gas tanks -- but disagreement between opponents and supporters of communist Cuba about mention of U.S. sanctions against the communist island, as well as other marginal issues.

The summit was called by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation to discuss securing food supplies in the face of rising demand -- especially from rapidly developing Asian countries -- poor harvests and rising fuel costs.

Those factors have contributed to a doubling of commodity prices over the last couple of years which the World Bank says has put 100 million people at risk of joining the 850 million already going hungry.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development sees prices of rice, corn and wheat retreating from peaks but still up to 50 percent higher in the next decade. The FAO says food production must rise 50 percent by 2050 to meet demand.

BRUTAL PRICE RISE

The summit's main message was due to be: "We firmly resolve to use all means to alleviate the suffering caused by the current crisis, to stimulate food production and to increase investment in agriculture."

Some question the use of the summit. President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, a sceptic of international attempts to solve hunger and critic of the FAO, said it was a waste of time.

"There's been a brutal rise in prices (of food) and we were told there was a threat hanging over the world and all the heads of state were called to attend. I thought it was going to be to answer the question about what should be done, but it wasn't that at all," Wade told Reuters.

"It was just a conference like any other and that's why I was disappointed," said Wade, one of more than 40 heads of state and government who attended the Rome summit.

British-based poverty campaign group Oxfam was more upbeat.

"It would be very easy to dismiss this food summit as a talking shop," said Barbara Stocking, head of Oxfam GB. "But it could be a stepping stone to better policies and the money to implement them."

Although the summit was not meant to produce promises of aid or set new global policies, it has set the tone on food and hunger for more concrete talks in the coming months.

Group of Eight leaders meet in Japan in July, by which time a food crisis task force set up by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is due to have issued a concrete action plan.

The summit's talks on the potential benefits to poor farmers from new global trade rules will feed into a push to conclude the so-called Doha round of World Trade Organisation talks, which reach a potentially conclusive phase in the coming weeks.

UN Food Summit Opens to Address Food Crisis - Japanese Agency

from Air America

Rome - A UN food summit opened Tuesday in Rome to address a crisis stemming from surging food prices, with top UN officials calling for the need to increase food availability for vulnerable people and to eradicate hunger.

At the outset of the three-day meeting convened by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon urged the international community to work together to overcome the global food crisis.

"We must improve vulnerable people's access to food and take immediate steps to increase food availability in their communities," he said. "Only by acting together, in partnership, can we overcome this crisis, today and for tomorrow."

Ban warned against export restrictions by food-exporting nations. "Some countries have taken action by limiting exports or by imposing price controls...I call on nations to resist such measures and to immediately release exports designated for humanitarian purposes," he said.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick joined Ban in warning against the trade practice.

"We need an international call to remove export bans and restrictions," he said in a speech to the food summit. "These controls encourage hoarding, drive up prices, and hurt the poorest people around the world who are struggling to feed themselves," he said.

Zoellick urged the world community to take quick action to address the global food crisis, which he says " could push 100 million people into poverty - 30 million in Africa alone - reversing the gains made in poverty reduction over the last seven years."

"This is not a natural catastrophe. It is man-made and can be fixed by us. It does not take complex research. We know what has to be done. We just need action and resources in real time," he said.

FAO Director General Jacques Diouf called for world leaders to extend financial support, saying $30 billion is needed annually to eradicate hunger.

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda called on the international community to take emergency steps in concert to deal with the food crisis while pledging additional Japanese aid of $50 million to help developing countries, including those in Africa.

Meanwhile, a revised draft declaration proposed for adoption at the summit shows participants will likely urge governments to undertake an "international dialogue on biofuels" as part of efforts to deal with the food crisis.

Kyodo News obtained a copy of the draft declaration of the three- day summit, with heads of state and government representatives taking part.

The wording in the revised draft, however, indicates a setback for efforts to control biofuels from the preceding draft. The earlier draft dated May 20, which was also made available to Kyodo News, urged governments to study the possibility of "international policy guidelines" for sustainable bioenergy production.

The proposal for international policy guidelines has been deleted from the revised text, which instead reads, "We call upon...national Governments, partnerships, the private sector, and civil society, to together undertake a coherent, results-oriented international dialogue on biofuels, in the context of food security and the environment."

Japan and other food-importing countries have blamed global food price hikes on the diversion of corn and sugarcane to biofuels and have been calling for the development of biofuels not derived from food crops.

But major biofuel-producing nations, such as the United States and Brazil, have dismissed the impact of biofuel output on food prices as small.

The revised draft calls on governments "not to institute trade actions, such as export limits or bans that could threaten stability of food supply," a phrase that has been incorporated at the request of food-importing countries including Japan.

But this proposal may be revised due to opposition from food- exporting nations.

Tough bargaining over the wording of the declaration, which will be adopted Thursday, is expected to continue during the course of the summit as it will lay the groundwork for debates at the Group of Eight summit at the Lake Toya resort in Hokkaido on July 7-9.

Japan is also calling on other participating countries to recognize the importance of greater domestic agricultural production.

But this assertion has caused another point of discord with the United States and other countries demanding further liberalization of farm trade.

The revised text calls attention to soaring food prices, biofuel production and climate change as factors that could undermine food security.

Food crisis affects health and disease-WHO head

from Reuters Africa

By Laura MacInnis

ROME - More than 20 countries already have serious problems of malnutrition and stunted growth as a result of the food crisis that has set back anti-poverty efforts by years, the World Health Organisation head said on Tuesday.

In an interview in Rome, where world leaders are meeting to discuss global food shortages, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan said soaring commodity prices stood to threaten the lives of sick people, pregnant women, and children.

"We are already beginning to see signs that the world has close to one billion people who are suffering from hunger," she told Reuters, adding that more people will die from "different types of morbidity" if the problem worsens.

People with HIV/AIDS and other immune-destroying diseases need good nutrition to remain healthy, and those made weak by diarrhoea, pneumonia, malaria and measles would become sicker or die if they cannot eat well, the United Nations agency chief said.

Adequate food is also key to keeping pregnant and lactating women and their babies alive, and necessary to ward off malnutrition that can stunt the growth of children, she warned.

"Their conditions will be further exacerbated because of malnutrition," she said.

"For healthy people like you and me, the food crisis hit our pockets. But for the poor people, it means less food. The quantity and the quality of their meals will suffer," she said.

"If food prices go up, it means they have less money for health services, because in many of these countries these people depend on out-of-pocket expenditure for health services."

MALNUTRITION

According to WHO analysis, 21 countries already have serious acute or chronic malnutrition, and dozens more are struggling to cope with a high burden of disease that could be made worse by food shortages.

Those seen most vulnerable are Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, India, Laos, Madagascar, Mali, Myanmar, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Timor-Leste and Yemen.

Chan said that the WHO, which sets global health standards and leads the fight against infectious and chronic diseases, would intensify its monitoring for malnutrition and related ailments in response to the current crisis.

The WHO will also work closely with other U.N. agencies to keep a close eye on the spread of H5N1 bird flu and other animal and plant ailments that could threaten food supplies as well as public health, Chan said.

U.N. Chief: World Food Production Must Increase 50% to Avoid Crisis

from E Flux Media

By Diane Smith

United Nations Secretary Ban Ki-Moon said the food production must drastically increase to cope with the higher demands of a rising population corroborated with the crisis started by oil prices, climate change and the impact of the bio-fuel market.

While attending a major U.N. food summit in Rome, the U.N. chief called on world governments to take the necessary measures in order to increase the world food production by 50%. According to recent estimations, the measures must fill the demand of nearly 862 million hungry people worldwide.

"Hundreds of millions of the world's people expect no less," Ban said during the opening of the three-day World Food Security conference.

“The world needs to produce more food,'' he added.

Ban added that nothing is more degrading than hunger and it brings with it anger, social disintegration, ill health and economic decline. The U.N. Secretary called on governments to expand microcredit to small farmers, reduce trade barriers and tariffs, and increase investment in agriculture.

The 50% increase of world’s food production should be accomplished by 2030, Ban said. If not, the wide spread hunger will most likely cause civil unrest and starvation.

The government leaders gathered at the summit in Rome are trying to come up with solutions to make sure that the high commodity prices (the highest in 30 years) don't further swell the ranks of the world's 860 million hungry people.

Riots have occurred in about 30 countries (including Egypt and Cameroon) since last year when a 60 percent increase in food prices was recorded.

The leaders of the world’s wealthiest nations provided $6.3 billion in emergency aid last year, but that won’t help much, said most critics. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization chief, Jacques Diouf, an investment of $30 billion each year would be enough to increase agricultural production and prevent hunger from spreading worldwide.

Food costs threaten gains against poverty

from the Chicago Tribune

By Laurie Goering

NEW DELHI — Gita Devi grew up poor but in recent years has begun feeling something akin to rich.

The 35-year-old house cleaner and her construction worker husband earn a total of $205 a month, an income that has pushed them and their children just above the cutoff point for extreme poverty, set by the World Bank at $1 per person per day.

"Whatever we earn gets spent," she said. But the family brings in enough to keep all three children in school, to afford three basic meals a day and to buy Devi the occasional new sari, even if it does have to last a year. Compared with the past, "I'm earning more," she said. "I'm stronger and I have more."

Yet record food and oil prices threaten to push Devi and 100 million people like her worldwide back into abject poverty, development experts estimate.

Surging inflation is striking hardest at the world's very poor, who are forced to spend 60 percent to 80 percent of their income on food, experts say.

If long-term prices stay high—as food analysts predict—the financial burden could drive families back below the poverty line and undermine progress toward the goal of halving the world's poverty and hunger by 2015, a target established at the UN Millennium Summit in New York in 2000.

Leaders of more than 40 nations will grapple with this and other problems when they gather Tuesday for another United Nations summit in Rome, this one on the growing global food crisis. The aim of the three-day summit is to seek common strategies on agriculture, trade, subsidies and biofuels to offset the highest food prices in 30 years.

Higher food and oil costs are "definitely a problem for the [UN] Millennium Development Goals," said Alex Evans, a London-based expert in food prices and development and a fellow at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University.

National and international aid programs could help close some of the gap, Evans said. But he cautioned that persistent price increases will lead to inequality and political unrest in developing countries. "If this is a long-term structural shift, the new normal, there are quite big questions about the sustainability of that over the long run."

Just as troubling, surging food and oil prices threaten to make hunger and extreme poverty not only a lingering problem in Africa but a resurgent one in Asian countries, including Bangladesh and Vietnam, that had been on track to reduce extreme poverty, said Selim Jahan, a poverty policy expert with the United Nations Development Program.

Efforts to cut abject poverty have proved extraordinarily difficult in many parts of the world. By some estimates, the number of people living on $1 a day or less has fallen from around 1.3 billion in 1998 to about 1 billion today, according to the 2007 UN Human Development Report.

'Very strange inequities'
Progress has been slow, particularly in the places with the largest numbers of very poor. Between 1981 and 2001, the percentage of sub-Saharan Africans living in extreme poverty nearly doubled, to 316 million, largely due to economic stagnation and emerging problems such as the AIDS epidemic. Extreme poverty has since declined only slightly in Africa, Jahan said.

India, despite its growing reputation for economic success, still has the largest number of people living in abject poverty: more than 350 million, about a third of the population.

As a few million Indians ride the wave of the nation's economic emergence, hundreds of millions of others find themselves left behind, a fact that has bred frustration and fueled insurgent movements around the country.

"Growing economic prosperity is creating very strange inequities," said A.K. Shiv Kumar, a development economist in New Delhi.

India has tried to close the gap by providing benefits aimed primarily at the poor, including free midday meals in public schools.

India's current government, well aware that inflation in food prices helped doom its predecessor, has also deployed a range of subsidies to try to keep basic food and fuel prices low.

But economists say many such measures end up benefiting wealthier Indians as well and may not be sustainable in the long run.

Subsidies "help the middle class with consumption and force you to spend more money than you have, causing inflation," Evans warned. Instead, what countries should aim for are social safety nets narrowly targeted at the very poorest, he and Jahan said.

That is a challenge in India, where government distribution programs are tainted by corruption and much government help is siphoned off before it reaches the poor—and where it sometimes seems nearly everyone is clamoring to be classified as extremely disadvantaged.

'We are going nowhere'
In Africa, more nations are for the first time putting in place government-funded welfare programs, primarily to help support children orphaned by AIDS, Kumar said. Such investment, if combined with boosted government spending on basic education, health care, nutrition and sanitation, could mitigate the effects of higher food and oil prices on the very poor, he said.

Other keys to easing price pressure on the poorest will be investing in research to boost agricultural productivity, ensuring emergency international food aid programs are adequately funded, and finding ways to target international assistance not at countries with the lowest income average—the traditional target—but at specific pockets and regions of extreme poverty regardless of what nation they lie in, development experts said.

"The focus should be on poor people rather than poor countries," Evans said. "The whole approach needs an update."

What crisis? Worst is yet to come

from the Globe and Mail

ERIC REGULY

ROME — Is there a food crisis? In the strictest definition, no. There is hunger, but no starvation. There are sporadic food riots in the poorest countries, but no widespread, out-of-control urban panic.

If you don't believe there is a crisis, you might think this week's Food Summit in Rome, sponsored by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Agency (FAO), is another bureaucratic boondoggle in the making, a grand photo opportunity for everyone from the Pope (Benedict XVI is indeed coming) to Nicolas Sarkozy and his fashionably low-cal wife.

Viewed in a different way, the crisis is genuine and potentially horrific. Galloping food prices tell the story. Thanks to two decades of scant investment in agriculture, soaring populations and the new protein-craving diets in the developing world, almost every food commodity is up by triple-digit rates in the past two years. In the first three months of this year alone, the FAO food-price index rose 53 per cent over the same period in 2007.

The brutal truth is that the world has consumed more food than it has produced for the past eight years. Global stocks for rice and soya, the staple foods for billions of people, have fallen to 10 to 15 per cent of annual consumption from about 20 per cent (the stock-to-use ratio). In other words, the world is no more than two months - a month short of the next harvest - from running out of food.

Here's another scary bit of information: The growth in farm yields, or productivity, is falling. The FAO's database says cereal yields rose by almost 3 per cent a year between 1961 and 1984, in good part thanks to Asia's Green Revolution. Since then, the yield improvement has fallen by more than half. This explains why the Malthusians are coming out of the closet.

If rate of yield improvement falls below the rate of population increase, "starvation" would replace "crisis" in the headlines.

With perhaps two billion poor people, many making $1 a day or less, suddenly worried about feeding themselves, the Food Summit delegates will have some planning to do. The short-term fixes don't require a lot of imagination. The World Food Programme (WFP), the UN's emergency food agency, will get topped up with funds so it won't lose its buying muscle. Saudi Arabia just pledged $500-million (U.S.) to the WFP. Similarly, the World Bank has unveiled a $1.2-billion facility to finance safety-net programs and grants to the poorest countries.

Medium- and long-term solutions are where the challenges lie. Where should the money and energy go?

There is no doubt the best bang for the buck would come from helping the armies of small, poor farmers. They make up 85 per cent of all farms in the world. They don't necessarily need genetically modified (GM) seeds and air-conditioned tractors (though they would help). Far simpler and cheaper things could boost their farm yields dramatically.

Take irrigation. Only about 5 per cent of Africa's arable land is irrigated; the crops on the rest of the land depend on rainwater, which may or may not come. Irrigation systems can boost yields dramatically. But better yields are not the only way to keep the planet fat and happy. Another way is to reduce losses after the harvest. In some parts of Africa, 50 per cent of the harvested crops are destroyed by insects and rodents. The loss is compounded by fear. Knowing their stockpiles are a rapidly wasting asset, farmers try to sell as much as they can as fast as they can. As the grains flood the market immediately after the harvest, the price falls.

The solution is dead simple: Proper warehouses. Some aid groups, including the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture (which is funded by Syngenta, the Swiss agribusiness giant) are building cement and brick warehouses in rural Africa.

Roads can also help enormously. If farmers can't get the food to market, they can't earn the income required to grow more food.

Help to small farmers is a proven winner. Vietnam went from a "food deficit" country, to use the UN term to describe a country that needs imports to feed itself, to a substantial food exporter because of small-farm development. There was a nice side benefit too. Vietnam's poverty rate fell below 15 per cent last year, from 58 per cent in 1979. The World Bank's World Development Report, released earlier this year, showed that GDP growth generated by agriculture is up to four times more effective in reducing poverty than growth in other industries.

Boosting the productivity of small farmers is not optional. Here's another scary food statistic. In spite of food's near vertical price curve since 2006, prices, adjusted for inflation, are still well below their mid-1970s level. The food "crisis" may just be getting started.

Food price "catastrophe" feared on eve of summit

from Reuters Africa

By Robin Pomeroy

ROME (Reuters) - Soaring food prices could trigger a global catastrophe, with the world's poor unable to feed their families, human rights activists said on Monday.

The warning came as world leaders arrived in Rome for a U.N. summit to tackle the food crisis which is pushing 100 million people into hunger, provoking food protests and could aggravate violence in war zones.

"The current food crisis amounts to a gross violation of human rights and could fuel a global catastrophe, as many of the world's poorest countries, particularly those forced into import dependency, struggle to feed their people," said Johannesburg-based poverty campaign group ActionAid.

"It is an outrage that poor people are paying for decades of policy mistakes such as the lack of investment in agriculture and the dismantling of support for smallholder farmers," said ActionAid analyst Magdalena Kropiwnicka.

Forty-four world leaders are expected at the three-day meeting, which kicks off a round of diplomatic talks on poverty, hunger and development in the coming months, including a G8 Summit, a U.N. General Assembly and potentially conclusive talks on new world trade rules.

"This is a multi-faceted issue that calls for a multi-faceted response and considerations," said Japan's Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, adding he hoped the summit would issue a "forceful message on medium- to long-term measures such as increasing food production and agriculture productivity".

The hunger discussions however risk being overshadowed by the presence of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who both have strained relations with the West. The European Union has imposed a travel ban on Mugabe, but that does not apply to U.N. meetings.

The summit was called last year by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to talk about climate change and biofuels, but the food price crisis will now take centre stage.

PROTESTS AND VIOLENCE

Poor harvests, low stocks and rising demand, especially from India and China, caused huge food price spikes over the last two years, stoking protests, strikes and violence in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has warned that increased hunger caused by the price spikes will exacerbate conflict in war zones.

With food prices expected to remain high over the next decade even if they fall back from current records, the summit will address long-term policies, such as support for small farmers and trade reforms, as well as immediate food aid.

One of the first leaders to arrive, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, said he would defend biofuels -- foodstuffs converted into energy -- from attacks from hunger campaigners.

"It's up to Brazil, a centre of excellence in ethanol production, to prove that it's fully possible to make ethanol output compatible with the production of food."

Brazil is the world's largest ethanol exporter and a pioneer in sugar-cane based biofuels. The United States is massively increasing the production of ethanol from maize and the European Union aims to produce 10 percent of automobile fuels from bio-energy by 2020.

But opponents of biofuel say it has caused 30 percent of the global food price hikes by diverting food from people's mouths into fuel tanks and competing for arable land.

"To continue the pursuit of biofuels in the face of the credible, impartial and growing opinion that this is exacerbating the food crisis is morally outrageous and utterly indefensible," said Rob Bailey, of hunger campaigners Oxfam International.

ActionAid said it wanted the summit to stop arable land being switched to biofuel production.