Jacques Diouf, head of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said the summit would seek to reform trade, encourage greater food production in developing countries and ensure funding for infrastructure and agricultural productivity.

“I have just put the idea (of holding a food summit) to U. S. president-elect Barack Obama in my message of congratulations,” he told the body’s governing conference.

Diouf said he hoped the summit would find $30 billion a year to help boost developing country farm output.

FAO hosted what became an ad hoc food summit in June. That conference, called before a surge in commodity prices, was meant to concentrate on the effect of climate change and biofuel production on food security.

But with the price spike hammering the many developing countries that rely on food imports, the focus shifted to getting emergency help to the hungry. The conference came up with no firm political commitments or policy changes.

The 2009 meeting “should lay the ground for a new system of agricultural trade that offers farmers, in developed and developing countries alike, the means of earning a decent living,” Diouf said.

The summit would also aim to set up an “emergency intervention fund” to help farmers in vulnerable countries rapidly increase output when commodity market spikes hit food import bills. Rising prices early this year plunged millions of people into hunger and sparked food riots around the world.

Diouf said a 14 per cent fall in global food prices since July had done little to alleviate the problems.

FAO’s food price index was still 51 per cent higher in September than two years earlier. Input prices – such as seeds and fertilizer – had doubled or tripled, he said.

The lower prices did not mean the end of the food crisis but stemmed more from lower demand because of the global economic slowdown, he said.

“What is more, the downturn in prices could lead to reduced food production in 2009-10, which would result in another food crisis.”

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Growing demand for biofuels will boost prices of agricultural commodities in the next 10 years.

The western world needs to rethink its rush to biofuels, which has done more harm pushing up food prices than it has good by reducing greenhouse gases, a United Nations report said Oct. 7.

The UN Food and Agr icul ture Organizat ion (FAO) said policies encouraging biofuel production and use in Europe and the U. S. was likely to maintain pressure on food prices but have little impact on weaning car users away from oil.

“The report finds that while biofuels will offset only a modest share of fossil energy use over the next decade, they will have much bigger impacts on agriculture and food security,” FAO said in its annual State of Food and Agriculture report.

Growing demand for biofuels will boost prices of agricultural commodities in the next 10 years, the report said.

For instance, if demand for biofuel agricultural feedstock rose 30 per cent by 2010 from 2007, it would drive sugar prices up by 26 per cent, maize prices by 11 per cent and vegetable oil prices by six per cent, FAO said.

With global stocks low and crops dependent on weather, food prices would remain volatile, it said.

Anti-hunger campaigners have blamed biofuels, which convert crops such as maize, sugar, oil seeds and palm oil into liquid fuel for use in cars, for pushing up global food prices, contributing to soaring food bills in the last two years.

The global food import bill is expected to jump 26 per cent to US$1.035 trillion in 2008, powered by price rises in rice, wheat and vegetable oils, FAO said.

Looking ahead to 2010, FAO forecast a seven per cent rise in the world output of main agricultural crops – wheat, rice, coarse grains, rapeseed, soybean, sunflower seed, palm oil and sugar – compared to 2007.

Urgent

The food-versus-fuel debate was stoked last year when then UN envoy on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, said using arable land to make fuel was a “crime against humanity.”

The FAO report uses far less dramatic language and does not quantify biofuels’ contribution to commodity price spikes, which were also due to poor harvests and demand for a richer diet in places such as China and India.

But it does say the rise in biofuels has put more people at risk of hunger and requiring food aid and other assistance. It also pours doubt on the claim that biofuels reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Crops soak up CO2 – the main greenhouse gas blamed for climate change – when they grow, but fuel used in their cultivation and processing reduces that efficiency and if trees are cleared to plant them, any gains can be lost.

“In many cases, increased emissions from land-use change are likely to offset or even exceed the greenhouse gas savings obtained by replacing fossil fuels with biofuels, and impacts on water, soil and biodiversity are also a concern,” FAO said.

With the exception of sugar cane ethanol production in Brazil, biofuel production only thrives when subsidized.

“There is an urgent need to review current policies supporting, subsidizing and mandating biofuel production and use,” the report said, recommending more funding be directed to “second-generation” biofuels which will come from non-food plant matter such as straw or algae.

Transportation accounts for 29 per cent of the world’s total energy consumption and only 0.9 per cent of that comes from biofuels, a proportion that the International Energy Agency says could rise to 2.3 per cent by 2015 and 3.2 per cent by 2030.

Biofuels’ rise could provide an opportunity for farmers in developing countries to develop the new cash crops, the report said, but that would only happen if subsidy regimes were changed to favour poorer countries rather than richer ones.

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