By Stephen Brown and Robin Pomeroy
ROME (Reuters) - The United Nations urged a summit on theglobal food crisis on Tuesday to help stop the spread ofstarvation threatening nearly 1 billion people by loweringtrade barriers and removing export bans.
"Nothing is more degrading than hunger, especially whenman-made," U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told worldleaders who are likely to disagree over the link betweenbiofuel 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 hadbeen spending billions of dollars on farm subsidies, wastefuland excess consumption of food, and on arms.
" ... The excess consumption by the world's obese costs $20billion (10.1 billion pounds) annually, to which must be addedindirect costs of $100 billion resulting from premature deathand related diseases," said FAO Director General Jacques Diouf,who is from Senegal.
The World Bank and aid agencies estimate soaring foodprices could push as many as 100 million more people intohunger. About 850 million are already hungry.
Ban estimated the "global price tag" to overcome the foodcrisis would be $15-20 billion a year and that food supply hadto rise 50 percent by the year 2030 to meet climbing demand.
"Some countries have taken action by limiting exports or byimposing draft controls," he said. This "distorts markets andforces prices even higher. I call on nations to resist suchmeasures and to immediately release exports designated forhumanitarian purposes".
Aid agencies say Japan and China have contributed to highrice prices, which have triggered riots as far away as Haiti,by controlling their stocks. Japanese Prime Minister YasuoFukuda promised to release at least 300,000 tonnes of importedrice.
The Rome summit will set the tone on food aid and subsidiesfor the Group of Eight summit in Japan in July and what isregarded as the concluding stages of the stalled talks underthe World Trade Organisation aimed at reducing tradedistortions.
A British minister urged the European Union to help reducefood prices by reforming farm policies that costs consumersover 40 billion euros a year and suspending some food importtariffs.
"I do not see how Europe can justify keeping EU prices somuch higher than world market levels at a time when peopleacross Europe are really feeling the pinch," said Treasuryminister Yvette Cooper.
FOOD TO FUEL
The cost of major food commodities has doubled over thelast couple of years, with rice, corn and wheat at recordhighs. This has provoked protests and riots in some developingcountries where people may spend more than half their income onfood.
The OECD sees prices retreating from their current peaksbut still up to 50 percent higher in the coming decade. OECDchief Angel Gurria said in Paris that oil prices, "which arepart and parcel of food prices", would not ease sharply either.
That has increased interest in biofuels, blamed by many forcompeting with food output for grains and oilseed. The UnitedStates and Brazil, the world's biggest producer of ethanol fromsugar cane, defended biofuels from such accusations in Rome.
"It offends me to see fingers pointed against clean energyfrom biofuels, fingers soiled with oil and coal," BrazilianPresident Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told the summit.
The United States plans to channel a quarter of its maizecrop into ethanol production by 2022 and the European Unionplans to get 10 percent of auto fuel from bio-energy by 2020.
Biofuel producers wrote to the summit urging energy sourcesto be diversified when "a highly constrained supply of crudeoil and petroleum products is wreaking havoc on all countriesand markets across the globe, especially with respect to food".
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Shafer says biofuels accountfor only 3 percent of the total food price risem, while thecharity Oxfam said it was closer to 30 percent.
Brazil's Lula da Silva said rich nations' "intolerableprotectionism" was the main cause of global food inflation.
"Subsidies create dependency, breakdown entire productionsystems and provoke hunger and poverty where there could beprosperity. It is past time to do away with them," he said.
A distraction from food at the summit was the presence ofZimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on hisfirst trip to the European Union. Critics accuse both ofcontributing to food shortages at home.
Italian Jews protested against the Iranian leader'scomments that Israel would disappear, chanting "Israel, Israel,Israel" on a hill by the ancient Roman Circus Maximus, near thesummit.
