URGENT action must be taken to tackle the soaring cost of food that is plunging poor nations into crisis, according to a new Oxfam report.
As world leaders prepared to meet in Rome for an emergency United Nations food summit, Oxfam called on governments to draw up a global action plan to tackle the disaster.
With world food prices up 83 per cent on three years ago, Oxfam estimates 2
90 million people are struggling to afford to eat.
The charity said the crisis dwarfed the number of people affected by even the largest natural disaster, such as the 2004 Asian tsunami.
According to the charity's report entitled The Time is Now, an extra £7.33 billion is needed in immediate assistance.
But as well as short-term help, Oxfam wants a longer-term plan of action to be drawn up that supports agriculture in developing countries, puts a stop to biofuels targets, and helps poor countries get a fair deal from trade.
It blames soaring food bills on high oil prices, rising demand for cereals linked with the growth in biofuels, and increased consumption in countries such as India and China.
Climate change is also expected to lead to more weather-related disasters, adding to food instability.
The charity said its aid workers were seeing millions of people forced to eat less food, as well as cut back on healthcare, education and other necessities. Women's and children's nutritional levels are particularly vulnerable, as women often put men's consumption before their own.
Oxfam Great Britain's chief executive, Barbara Stocking, said: "In countries where Oxfam works, we are seeing the negative impact of higher food prices on poor people, who already spend more than half their income on food.
"This is a huge challenge to the leadership and legitimacy of the world's multilateral institutions, but also a genuine opportunity for long-overdue reforms."
She said the amount of money is small compared to more than one trillion dollars which the US Federal Reserve and European Central Bank have injected into the financial system in the past six months to try to avert economic crisis.
She said: "An unprecedented level of co-ordination is required across agencies, governments and the private sector to address this crisis.
"The vast amount of money spent on averting the financial crisis shows what is possible when there is political will. The cost of failure will not just be measured in lost lives and human suffering, but also in lost credibility."
ActionAid analyst Magdalena Kropiwnicka agreed there needed to be a focus on providing more help to agriculture in developing countries.
"It is an outrage that poor people are paying for decades of policy mistakes such as the lack of investment in agriculture and the dismantling of support for smallholder farmers," she said.
The World Food Security conference begins in Rome today.
STOP PUSHING BIOFUELSUsing food crops to produce biofuels is a hugely inefficient use of agriculture, according to Oxfam.
The amount of grain required to produce enough ethanol to fill the tank of an SUV is enough to feed a person for an entire year.
As well as diverting food crops into fuel production, biofuels also compete with food production for agricultural land.
The International Food Policy Research Institute has estimated that the push for biofuels explains 30 per cent of recent food price inflation. Oxfam said governments should dismantle current subsidies and tax exemptions for biofuels.
IMMEDIATE AIDAn estimated 290 million people need immediate help in the form of food and cash and Oxfam believes that an extra £7.33 billion is needed to tackle the immediate problem.
The charity argues that cash is better than food aid.
Dumping food in communities can lead to dependency, undermining local production but giving cash can help support them.
As well as providing money, Oxfam recommends scaling up social protection schemes such as minimum income guarantees and setting up food reserves, such as national or regional grain banks.
SUPPORT AGRICULTUREThe food price crisis is caused in part by decades of neglect of farming in poor countries, according to Oxfam.
A lack of investment in agriculture has left rural households with nothing to fall back on when prices rise beyond their means. Three-quarters of the world's poor people still live in rural areas, most on small farms. But international aid to agriculture almost halved between 1980 and 2005. Oxfam said the aid budget for agriculture, about £2billion, is dwarfed by the support by rich countries for their own agricultural sectors, which in 2006 stood at an estimated £63billion a year.
Mugabe's presence 'an affront to the hungry'THE presence of Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, below, among the heads of state at this week's food summit has been criticised as "obscene" by Britain.
Mr Mugabe is making his first official trip abroad since elections condemned by Western and opposition leaders as fraudulent.
Douglas Alexander, the International Development Secretary, who is representing the UK at the summit, said: "I think it is obscene and I'm outraged by his attendance. We don't see Robert Mugabe as gaining any legitimacy or credibility from attending this meeting when four million of his own people are now relying on food aid as a direct consequence of his profound misrule of the country."
He vowed to have nothing to do with Mr Mugabe at the summit. "I'll neither shake hands with Robert Mugabe nor meet Robert Mugabe," he said.
The MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South claimed Mr Mugabe's attendance in Rome was "an affront to all Zimbabweans who are suffering hunger, destitution and poverty as a direct result of his rule". The EU has a long-standing travel ban on Mr Mugabe, but the Rome food summit is taking place under the umbrella of the United Nations.
Call for faster action on climate changePOOR countries appealed to a conference yesterday to move faster on an agreement to tackle climate change.
The call, by delegates from nations that said they were already suffering from floods and cyclones brought on by rising temperatures, came at the opening of a two-week meeting in Bonn.
During the conference 2,000 delegates will start tackling the details of a new climate change agreement to take effect after 2012, succeeding the first phase of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
"We are concerned over the slow progress of the last two years," said Amjad Abdulla of the Maldives, speaking for a group known as the Least Developed Countries. Climate change "for us is not a distant reality, but a present reality", and the recent cyclones that have battered Burma and Bangladesh "should be a wake-up call to all of us", he added.
The Bonn meeting builds on a landmark accord reached last December in Bali. For the first time, the US, China and India had indicated they would join a co-ordinated effort to control the carbon emissions blamed for climate change.
Scientists say the world's carbon emissions must peak in the next ten to 15 years and then fall by half by mid-century to avoid potentially catastrophic changes in weather patterns, a rise in sea levels that would threaten coastal cities and the mass extinction of plants and animals.
