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Rising food prices are partly to blame for adding 75 million more people to the ranks of the world’s hungry in 2007 and lifting the global figure to roughly 925 million, the UN’s food agency says.

Jacques Diouf, head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), presented the figure to Italy’s parliament ahead of the release of an official report on Thursday.

The latest data further distances the international community from reaching UN Millennium Development Goals that include halving hunger and poverty by 2015.

Diouf estimated that 850 million people were hungry before the 2007-2008 spike in food prices, which sparked widespread protests and even riots in the most affected nations.

The FAO hosted a food crisis summit in Rome in June to discuss ways to combat high food prices, blamed on poor harvests, high oil costs, biofuels and rising demand for basic staple crops, especially from fast-growing Asian countries.

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An internal report put together by the World Bank and leaked to the Guardian claims that biofuels may be responsible for up to 75 percent of recent rises in food prices. Even environmental groups haven’t gone that far in their estimates.

With soaring food prices high on the agenda for next week’s G-8 Summit in Japan, World Bank President Robert Zoellick has been clear that action needs to be taken. “What we are witnessing is not a natural disaster — a silent tsunami or a perfect storm,” he wrote in a Tuesday letter to major Western leaders. “It is a man-made catastrophe, and as such must be fixed by people.”

According to a confidential World Bank report leaked to the Guardian on Thursday, Zoellick’s organization may have a pretty good idea what that fix might look like: stop producing biofuels.

The report claims that biofuels have driven up global food prices by 75 percent, according to the Guardian report, accounting for more than half of the 140 percent jump in price since 2002 of the food examined by the study. The paper claims that the report, completed in April, was not made public in order to avoid embarrassing US President George W. Bush.

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Demand for land to grow food, fuel crops and wood is set to outstrip supply, leading to the probable destruction of forests, a report warns.

The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) says only half of the extra land needed by 2030 is available without eating into tropical forested areas.

A companion report documents poor progress in reforming land ownership and governance in developing countries.

Both reports were launched on Monday in UK government offices in London.

Supporters of RRI include the UK’s Department of International Development (DfID) and its equivalents in Sweden and Switzerland.

“Arguably, we are on the verge of a last great global land grab,” said RRI’s Andy White, co-author of the major report, Seeing People through the Trees.

“It will mean more deforestation, more conflict, more carbon emissions, more climate change and less prosperity for everyone.”

Rising demand for food, biofuels and wood for paper, building and industry means that 515 million hectares of extra land will be needed for growing crops and trees by 2030, RRI calculates.

But only 200 million hectares will be available without dipping into tropical forests.

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The replacement of traditional fuels with biofuels has dragged more than 30 million people worldwide into poverty, an aid agency report says.

Oxfam says so-called green policies in developed countries are contributing to the world’s soaring food prices, which hit the poor hardest.

The group also says biofuels will do nothing to combat climate change.

Its report urges the EU to scrap a target of making 10% of all transport run on renewable resources by 2020.

Oxfam estimates the EU’s target could multiply carbon emissions 70-fold by 2020 by changing the use of land.

The report’s author, Oxfam’s biofuel policy adviser Rob Bailey, criticised rich countries for using subsidies and tax breaks to encourage the use of food crops for alternative sources of energy like ethanol.

“If the fuel value for a crop exceeds its food value, then it will be used for fuel instead,” he said.

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Part one of a special series that explores the local faces of the world’s worst food crisis in decades.

In Australia a struggling farmer watches another harvest shrivel under the country’s worst drought on record.

Another new member of the Chinese middle-class finally has enough cash to buy his first steak.

And a U.S. agricultural executive decides to grow corn instead of wheat to take advantage of the growing demand for biofuels.

Alone, none of these events would have been responsible for today’s troubled stock markets, rampant civil unrest, and increasing famine and malnourishment for the world’s poor. (See a video on the world food crisis.)

Together, they’ve caused the world’s worst food crisis in a generation.

“A convergence of factors has led to what is sort of a perfect storm for food prices,” Erik Thorbecke, an economist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, told National Geographic News.

“I can’t think of a time we’ve had this large an increase.”

According to data from the International Monetary Fund, average global food prices have jumped nearly 50 percent since the end of 2006.

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Rich countries came under attack on Tuesday at the United Nations food summit for their biofuel subsidies and production targets, declining spending on development aid for agriculture and large subsidies to European and US farmers.

Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, told heads of state and governments gathered in Rome that ”nobody” understood why cereals had been diverted from human consumption ”mostly to satisfy a thirst for fuel vehicles”.

In an unexpectedly strong attack on western countries’ policies, he added that ”nobody understands” why rich countries had ”distorted world markets with the $272bn (€175bn, £138bn) spent on supporting their agriculture.” Mr Diouf said: ”The problem of food insecurity is a political one.”

Delegates and some FAO officials were surprised by his remarks, which opened a three-day summit in Rome to discuss ways to tackle soaring food prices. The cost of agricultural commodities has doubled since 2005.

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Speculators blamed for driving up price of basic foods as 100 million face severe hunger

Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.

The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world’s poor – who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food – into hunger and destitution.

The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world’s richest food companies are making record profits. Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (£275m) to $1.12bn. Its profits increased from $1.44bn to $2.22bn.

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- Research thanks to Kathy G. 

A brutal convergence of events has hit an unprepared global market, and grain prices are sky high. The world’s poor suffer most.

The globe’s worst food crisis in a generation emerged as a blip on the big boards and computer screens of America’s great grain exchanges. At first, it seemed like little more than a bout of bad weather.

In Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City, traders watched from the pits early last summer as wheat prices spiked amid mediocre harvests in the United States and Europe and signs of prolonged drought in Australia. But within a few weeks, the traders discerned an ominous snowball effect — one that would eventually bring down a prime minister in Haiti, make more children in Mauritania go to bed hungry, even cause American executives at Sam’s Club to restrict sales of large bags of rice.

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I’ve said for sometime that  few people will choose to starve quietly.   Japan is in a particularly perilous position.   Most of their oil  is imported and only 39%  (as this article reveals) of their food is grown domestically.   Eventually, they will have the choice of  retiring back to their preindustrial fishing villages and small farms or in going militaristic and taking what they need to preserve their current system by intimidation or force.  It’s not a pretty thought.

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MARIKO Watanabe admits she could have chosen a better time to take up baking. This week, when the Tokyo housewife visited her local Ito-Yokado supermarket to buy butter to make a cake, she found the shelves bare.

“I went to another supermarket, and then another, and there was no butter at those either. Everywhere I went there were notices saying Japan has run out of butter. I couldn’t believe it — this is the first time in my life I’ve wanted to try baking cakes and I can’t get any butter,” said the frustrated cook.

Japan’s acute butter shortage, which has confounded bakeries, restaurants and now families across the country, is the latest unforeseen result of the global agricultural commodities crisis.

A sharp increase in the cost of imported cattle feed and a decline in milk imports, both of which are typically provided in large part by Australia, have prevented dairy farmers from keeping pace with demand.

While soaring food prices have triggered rioting among the starving millions of the third world, in wealthy Japan they have forced a pampered population to contemplate the shocking possibility of a long-term — perhaps permanent — reduction in the quality and quantity of its food.

A 130% rise in the global cost of wheat in the past year, caused partly by surging demand from China and India and a huge injection of speculative funds into wheat futures, has forced the Government to hit flour millers with three rounds of stiff mark-ups. The latest — a 30% increase this month — has given rise to speculation that Japan, which relies on imports for 90% of its annual wheat consumption, is no longer on the brink of a food crisis, but has fallen off the cliff.

According to one government poll, 80% of Japanese are frightened about what the future holds for their food supply.

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The head of the UN World Food Programme has said urgent action is required to stimulate food production and help the poor cope with soaring food prices.

Josette Sheeran told the BBC that an additional 100 million people, who did not need assistance six months ago, could not now afford to purchase food.

Her warning came ahead of a meeting in London to discuss the rise in prices and an EU policy encouraging biofuels.

Biofuels are intended to tackle climate change but can take away farm land.

Earlier, Latin American leaders had warned about the growth in production of biofuels, which are derived from plant crops.

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