Higher world food prices here to stay, report says

NEW DELHI — Soaring world food prices may dip in coming months, but steadily rising demand means higher food costs are probably here to stay over the coming decade. That could fuel growing hunger and unrest in the world's poorest and most vulnerable nations, a United Nations agency reported Thursday.

In one of the strongest statements yet of the potential scale and impact of the world food-price crunch, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said there is ample reason to believe that "permanent factors" and not just inclement weather are behind the current rise in prices and that those will keep food costs at "higher average levels than in the past."

Compared with the past 10 years, wheat and corn prices are likely to be 40 to 60 percent higher, sugar prices 30 percent higher, and butter and oil prices 60 to 80 percent higher in current dollars over the coming decade, though the real increases could be somewhat less when inflation is taken into account, the organization said Thursday in its annual outlook report on world agriculture.

Such price boosts are largely the result of increased demand for food from developing countries such as China and India, where economic growth has boosted incomes and allowed people to broaden their diets, as well as from the growing production of biofuels in response to record oil costs.

The higher food prices represent a substantial threat to the world's poorest nations, particularly those that import much of their food and have few resources to provide any social safety net to the most vulnerable.

At a global summit next week in Rome on the world's growing food crunch, experts are expected to call for a rethinking of policies that promote the production of biofuels.

"Coherent action is urgently needed by the international community to deal with the impact of higher prices on the hungry and poor," Jacques Diouf, head of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, said at the launch of his agency's report Thursday in Paris.

"The poor, and in particular the urban poor in net food importing countries, will suffer more" as higher food prices become the norm, the report predicted. In nations such as Haiti, Kenya and Bangladesh, where people already spend more than half their income on food, price increases "will push more people into undernourishment," the report warned.

"Rising food prices mean an erosion of the capacity to meet basic needs, and this is likely to become a potential source of political tension and even violence," the report predicted.

Haiti and other vulnerable nations around the world, including Egypt and Pakistan, have suffered widespread rioting over food-price increases in recent months.

Worldwide, some 862 million people are already considered malnourished, international agencies say. Hunger is particularly on the increase in Africa, where everything from declining soil fertility to losses of farmers to AIDS has kept agricultural productivity stagnant, experts say.

The World Bank projects that demand for food will rise 60 percent worldwide by 2030, a particular challenge in light of the fact that only about 12 percent of the world's arable land is still unused and 16 percent of current farmland already is considered degraded, said Alex Evans, a London-based expert on development economics and fellow at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University.

Food-price increases, which began in earnest in 2006, now have affected most parts of the world. According to the report, the United States and parts of Europe have seen hefty boosts in the prices of commodities such as eggs and butter, while countries such as China and Kenya have seen overall food prices jump more than 20 percent.