HONG KONG, Feb 17: Rising food prices have hit Asia’s poor so hard that many have taken to the streets in protest, but experts see few signs of respite from the growing problem.

An array of factors, from rising food demand and high oil prices to global warming, could make high costs for essentials such as rice, wheat and milk a permanent fixture, they say.

“The indications are in general pointing to high prices,” Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior grains analyst at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome, told AFP.

The agency’s figures show food prices soared nearly 40 per cent in 2007, helping stoke protests in Myanmar, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Yet Asian economic growth is a key reason why prices rose, said Joachim von Braun, from the International Food Policy Research Institute.

“High growth in per capita income, especially in Asia, is driving demand for food,” said von Braun, the Washington-based group’s director-general.

At the same time, Asia’s growth has left many of its poor behind, he added.

They spend between 50 and 70 per cent of their meagre incomes on food, making price rises, especially debilitating.

“There was also a lack of investment in agriculture, particularly in science and technology and in irrigation,” von Braun said.

Apart from overall higher food demand, changes in taste favouring meat are said to be pushing up prices, since farmed animals feed heavily on grain.

Corruption, governments’ collusion with profit-hungry traders and businessmen, drought and bad weather, high oil prices stoking transport costs, spiking bio-fuel demand and low reserves have also played their part, experts say.

“In Australia, we lost almost a year of wheat due to drought,” said Katie Dean, an economist at ANZ Bank in Sydney.

Cold weather caused grain crops to fail in Europe and the United States, while bird flu culls and disease outbreaks hit Asian poultry and meat supply, she added, citing as an example pig diseases in China.

Elsewhere, Bangladesh is struggling to feed its poor after a 2007 cyclone destroyed 600 million dollars worth of its rice crop.

The price of rice rose around 70 per cent in Bangladesh last year.

More recently, unexpected snowstorms swept across rice growing areas in China, where rising food costs have already raised the fear of unrest.

Experts are still wary of pinning the blame for these events explicitly on the impact of global warming.

Indonesia has cut tariffs on soyabean imports, a staple food it gets mostly from the United States, and wants to curb its reliance on imports.

Malaysia is to establish a national food stockpile. It recently arrested dozens of activists protesting food price rises.

Vietnam said it would suspend rice exports, and India did so last year, say Duncan Macintosh, Manila-based development director for the International Rice Research Institute.

Urbanisation and industrialisation in Asia were eliminating farmland and soaking up scarce water resources, he added.

—AFP