By Stephen Brown and Robin Pomeroy
ROME (Reuters) - A United Nations summit on the global foodcrisis called on Tuesday for reducing trade barriers and thescrapping of food export bans to help stop the spread of hungerthat threatens nearly one billion people.
"Nothing is more degrading than hunger, especially whenman-made," United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon toldthe Rome summit, where the United States and Brazil defendedbiofuel production from charges that it pushes up world foodprices.
The head of the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organisation(FAO), hosting the summit, said wealthy nations spent billionsof dollars on farm subsidies, excess food consumption and 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".
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
The Rome summit will set the tone on food aid and subsidiesfor the Group of Eight summit in Japan in July and what ishoped to be the concluding stages of the stalled Doha talksunder the World Trade Organisation aimed at reducing tradedistortions.
WTO chief Pascal Lamy said a Doha deal "would reduce thetrade-distorting subsidies that have stymied the developingworld's production capacity". Of the 22 countries most affectedby the food crisis, "some are amongst the world's least tradeintegrated economies in agriculture", he said in a speech.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said richnations' "intolerable protectionism" was the main cause of foodinflation while U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer focusedon export restrictions, which in Asia have been blamed forrestricting rice supplies.
"We ask all countries to allow the free flow of food andthe technologies that produce food," said Schafer.
A British minister urged the European Union to cool pricesby reforming farm policies that cost consumers over 40 billioneuros ($62.4 billion) a year, saying Europe could not "justifykeeping EU prices so much higher than world market levels".
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.
DIRTY FINGERS
Rising fuel prices, as well as making agricultural supplieslike seeds and fertilisers more costly, have raised interest inbiofuels, blamed by many for competing with food output forgrains and oilseed.
The United States and Brazil, the world's biggest producerof ethanol from sugar cane, defended their biofuels industriesfrom such accusations in Rome. "It offends me to see fingerspointed against clean energy from biofuels, fingers soiled withoil and coal," 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.
Washington says biofuels account for only three percent ofthe total food price rise while Oxfam puts it closer to 30percent.
"The use of sustainable biofuels can increase energysecurity, foster economic development especially in rural areasand reduce greenhouse gas emissions without weighing heavily onfood prices," said Schafer.
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".
The summit was attended by Zimbabwean President RobertMugabe and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, both accusedby their critics of contributing to food shortages at home.
Washington said Mugabe's presence could only serve as anexample of "what not to do" on food security. A StateDepartment spokesman said his "ruinous policies" had turnedZimbabwe from a food exporter into a net importer with manystarving people.
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.
