High food prices here to stay: OECD, FAO

PARIS (AFP) - High global food prices are a new fact of life, a major report warned on Thursday as 22 countries, mostly in Africa, were listed as being at severe risk from record food and fuel costs.
At the same time, there were calls for an end to restrictions on the export of food, with open trade said to be vital in any solution to the record prices which have sparked protests in many countries. The cost of feeding the family will remain far higher than in the past decade, even though prices should ease in coming years, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation said in a report on the global agriculture outlook for the next 10 years.
The study was published against a background of protests in countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean in response to soaring food prices.
The jump in prices has added to the number of people in extreme hunger and some humanitarian aid is "urgently required," said the OECD and FAO joint report. "Current high prices will hit the poor and hungry people hardest," it said.
OECD chief economist Angel Gurria added: "The way to address rising food prices is not through protectionism but to open up agricultural markets."
The director general of the FAO, Jacques Diouf, told a press conference that "coherent action is urgently needed by the international community to deal with the impact of higher prices on the hungry and poor."
And in Yokohama, Japan, the head of the UN World Food Progamme, Josette Sheeran, urged "all nations to allow us to purchase food, even if they have controls for humanitarian purposes. This is very critical."
"Many nations have imposed export controls. Today we buy 80 percent of our humanitarian food in the developing world," Sheeran noted.
In Rome, the FAO listed 22 countries, most of them in Africa, which had high levels of "chronic hunger" and were "especially vulnerable" to rising food and fuel prices.
The OECD-FAO report said hundreds of millions of people were already going hungry before the price increases but that "the numbers of people suffering from extreme hunger have (now) increased even further.
"In the short term, humanitarian aid for the populations in countries most severely affected is urgently required," the report said.
Several factors had coincided to drive the "exceptional increases in prices" and some of the pressure would ease in the next few years.
But the two bodies warned that food subsidies and trade protection were not the answer, saying that high prices might even be part of the solution by stimulating neglected investment in agriculture in poor countries.
Raising food supplies in poor countries also depended on improved government, infrastructure and property rights, the OECD and the FAO said.
The report warned that rising prices had endangered the UN Millennium Development Goal of eradicating hunger and it was strongly sceptical about the benefits of agriculture-based biofuels, which have contributed to higher costs. However, the "transitory nature" of some of the factors behind the recent trend meant that prices would fall in due course from record peaks. The report pointed to "adverse weather conditions in major grain-producing regions of the world, with spillover effects on crops and livestock that compete for the same land.
"These conditions are not new. They have happened in the past and prices have come down once more normal conditions prevail and supply responds over time."
There was "no reason to believe that this will not recur over the next few years," it said, while adding that commodity prices will continue "substantially above" the levels of the past 10 years.
Comparing average prices for 2008 to 2017 with 1998 to 2007, it said beef and pork could be 20 percent higher; wheat, maize and skim milk powder 40-60 percent; butter and oilseeds more than 60 percent, and vegetable oils more than 80 percent.
The report cited changing diets, urbanisation, rising populations and economic growth as underpinning demand in developing countries.
The most-threatened countries listed by the FAO are Eritrea, Niger, the Comoros, Botswana, Haiti and Liberia.
They are followed in order of severity by Burundi, Tajikistan, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Zambia, the Central African Republic, Mozambique, Tanzania, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Malawi, Cambodia, North Korea, Rwanda and Kenya.