"If we don't deal with rising food prices the entire first Millennium Development Goal - to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger - will never be achieved," it said.
The U.N. Millennium Development Goals agreed in 2000 set out key targets to reduce world poverty by 2015, although many poor countries especially in Africa are not expected to achieve them.
TRADE TENSIONS
Rising food prices have also polarised positions over trade, just as World Trade Organisation talks on the "Doha Development Round" head to a key ministerial summit in late July intended to hammer out a long-delayed deal to liberalise global trade.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who assumed the rotating European Union presidency on Tuesday, has opposed dismantling EU agricultural subsidies which poor countries blame for keeping world prices low and for keeping their produce out of Europe.
"What African agriculture wants is open market access to Europe, but what Sarkozy is arguing for is more protection . Western G8 countries are under pressure from their domestic constituencies on this ," Alex Vines, head of the Africa Programme at London's Chatham House thinktank, said.
The G8 groups Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States.
The elephant in the room is China, whose massive demand for oil and commodities has thrown state budgets and inflation planning into disarray by pushing up prices and whose aid and investment packages challenge the role of Western aid in Africa.
Eager to secure mineral supplies, China has ramped up its commitments in resource-rich countries like Angola and Sudan.
A proposed $9 billion Chinese investment programme in Democratic Republic of Congo has threatened to derail IMF aid, a condition for the G8's own Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative.
Rising prices for Africa's commodities exports and increased foreign investment should strengthen Africa's bargaining power vis a vis the G8 and the Western-dominated IMF and World Bank.
Yet several African leaders due to attend the Japan summit - the same group represented at Gleneagles in 2005 - will do so in a significantly weaker position than three years ago. This includes outgoing South African President Thabo Mbeki and Nigeria's Umaru Yar'Adua, who was elected in flawed polls last year.
That will do little to mitigate the perennial problem of such summits: their remoteness from the realities of poverty.
As Kaly Jalloh, an unemployed youth of 19, said in Sierra Leone's capital Freetown: "We don't know anything about aid, but we know that poverty is too much."
