Food prices will remain high over the next decade even if they fall from current records, meaning millions more risk further hardship or hunger, the OECD and the UN's FAO food agency said in a report published this morning.
Beyond stating the immediate need for humanitarian aid, the international bodies suggested wider deployment of genetically modified crops and a rethink of biofuel programmes that guzzle grain which could otherwise feed people and livestock.
The report, released ahead of a world food summit in Rome next week, said food commodity prices were likely to recede from the peaks hit recently, but that they would remain higher in the decade ahead than the one gone by.
Beef and pork prices would probably stay around 20 per cent higher than in the last 10 years, while wheat, corn and skimmed milk powder would likely command 40-60 per cent more in the 10 years ahead, in nominal terms, it said.
"In many low-income countries, food expenditures average over 50 per cent of income and the higher prices contained in this outlook (report) will push more people into undernourishment," the report said.
Millions of people's purchasing power across the globe would be hit, said the report, co-produced by the Food and Agriculture Organision, the UN food agency in Rome, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris.
The cost of many food commodities has doubled over the last couple of years, sparking widespread protests and even riots in some of the worst affected spots, such as Haiti.
Many factors, including drought in big commodity-producing regions such as Australia, explained some of the acceleration in prices, as did growing demand from fast-developing countries such as China and India, the report said.
But it singled out the big drive to produce biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels, a push the US government is sponsoring heavily.
"Biofuel demand is the largest source of new demand in decades and a strong factor underpinning the upward shift in agricultural commodity prices," said the report, adding it was time to consider alternatives.
The benefits at environmental and economic level as well as in terms of energy security were "at best modest and sometimes even negative", the report said.
While it was hard to always identify exactly how much retail food prices were affected by food commodity prices, the direct impact was clearer in poorer countries where there is less of the value-added, packaged and processed food that is consumed more in wealthy regions, the report said.
The proportion of total funds that households use to pay for food varies hugely, from more than 60 per cent in Bangladesh, to 40 or 50 per cent in many other developing countries, and just 10 per cent in the United States or Germany, or 27 per cent in China, the report said.