UN holds food talks

The UN is holding a special emergency summit in Rome to calm fears of hunger and unrest because of rising food prices following a series of environmental disasters.

Friday's meeting of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in the Italian capital is expected to discuss Russia's grain export ban, imposed after a severe heatwave and wildfires devastated fields of crops.

UN officials said Russian grain company executives will be among those attending the summit, the AP news agency reported.

Flooding in Pakistan and China has also ruined wheat crops, adding to the pressure on the market.

Violent protests

High food prices, including a 30 per cent hike in the price of bread, recently led to violent protests in Mozambique in which 13 people were killed.

However, UN officials have stressed the situation is nowhere near the crisis seen in 2007-08, which witnessed dramatic increases in world food prices.

The Rome summit will also examine the role of market information and transparency, with higher food prices also blamed on rampant market speculators.

According to Britain's Guardian newspaper, the UN's special rapporteur on food has said that the increase in price of food commodities can be explained by institutional investors speculating on food markets.

In a paper obtained by the publication, Olivier De Schutter said: "A significant contributory cause of the price spike [has been] speculation by institutional investors who did not have any expertise or interest in agricultural commodities, and who invested in commodities index funds or in order to hedge speculative bets."

Earlier this month, the FAO said the rising prices of grain, meat and sugar were threatening nearly one billion poor people worldwide and blamed the rising cost of food for the "unacceptably high" level of global hunger.

It estimates that 925 million people are undernourished in 2010, a decline from 1.023 billion in 2009, due to a more favourable economic environment, but still higher than before the 2008 economic crisis.

The UN agency said the number of hungry people had been rising for more than a decade, reaching a record high in 2009 triggered by the economic crisis and high domestic food prices in several developing countries.