The United Nations urged a summit on the global food crisis on Tuesday to help stop the spread of starvation threatening nearly 1 billion people by lowering trade barriers and removing export bans.
"Nothing is more degrading than hunger, especially when man-made," U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told world leaders who are likely to disagree over the link between biofuel production and high food prices.
The head of the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which is hosting the summit, said wealthy nations had been spending billions of dollars on farm subsidies, wasteful and excess consumption of food, and on arms.
" The excess consumption by the world's obese costs $20 billion (10 billion pounds) annually, to which must be added indirect costs of $100 billion resulting from premature death and related diseases," said FAO Director General Jacques Diouf, who is from Senegal.
The World Bank and aid agencies estimate soaring food prices could push as many as 100 million more people into hunger. About 850 million are already hungry.
Ban estimated the "global price tag" to overcome the food crisis would be $15-20 billion a year and that food supply had to rise 50 percent by the year 2030 to meet climbing demand.
"Some countries have taken action by limiting exports or by imposing draft controls," he said. This "distorts markets and forces prices even higher. I call on nations to resist such measures and to immediately release exports designated for humanitarian purposes".
Aid agencies say Japan and China have contributed to high rice prices, which have triggered riots as far away as Haiti, by controlling their stocks. Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda promised at the summit to release at least 300,000 tonnes of imported rice from storage to ease the crisis.
The Rome summit will set the tone on food aid and subsidies for the Group of Eight summit in Japan in July and what is regarded as the concluding stages of the stalled talks under the World Trade Organisation aimed at reducing trade distortions.
