ROME, June 3: A United Nations summit on the global food crisis called on Tuesday for reducing trade barriers and the scrapping of food export bans to help stop the spread of hunger that threatens nearly one billion people.

“Nothing is more degrading than hunger, especially when man-made,” United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the Rome summit, where the United States and Brazil defended biofuel production from charges that it pushes up world food prices.

The head of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), hosting the summit, said wealthy nations spent billions of dollars on farm subsidies, excess food consumption and arms.

“The excess consumption by the world’s obese costs $20 billion annually, to which must be added indirect costs of $100 billion resulting from premature death and related diseases,” said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf, who is from Senegal.

The World Bank and aid agencies estimate soaring food prices could push as many as 100 million more people into hunger. About 850 million are already hungry.

Ban estimated the “global price tag” to overcome the food crisis would be $15-20 billion a year and that food supply had to rise 50 per cent by the year 2030 to meet climbing demand.

“Some countries have taken action by limiting exports or by imposing draft controls,” he said. This “distorts markets and forces prices even higher. I call on nations to resist such measures and to immediately release exports designated for humanitarian purposes”.

The Rome summit will set the tone on food aid and subsidies for the Group of Eight summit in Japan in July and what is hoped to be the concluding stages of the stalled Doha talks under the World Trade Organisation aimed at reducing trade distortions.

WTO chief Pascal Lamy said a Doha deal “would reduce the trade-distorting subsidies that have stymied the developing world’s production capacity”. Of the 22 countries most affected by the food crisis, “some are amongst the world’s least trade integrated economies in agriculture”, he said in a speech.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said rich nations’ “intolerable protectionism” was the main cause of food inflation while US Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer focused on export restrictions, which in Asia have been blamed for restricting rice supplies.

“We ask all countries to allow the free flow of food and the technologies that produce food,” said Schafer.

A British minister urged the European Union to cool prices by reforming farm policies that cost consumers over 40 billion euros ($62.4 billion) a year, saying Europe could not “justify keeping EU prices so much higher than world market levels”.

The cost of major food commodities has doubled over the last couple of years, with rice, corn and wheat at record highs. This has provoked protests and riots in some developing countries where people may spend more than half their income on food.

The OECD sees prices retreating from their current peaks but still up to 50 per cent higher in the coming decade.

UN chief called for a huge rise in food production.

“We have a historic opportunity to revitalise agriculture,” Ban told some 50 heads of state and government, gathered for the three-day summit.

“I call on you to take bold and urgent steps to address the root causes of this global food crisis,” he said.

With food prices at a 30-year high, the UN secretary general warned that while the world must “respond immediately,” it must also put the long-term focus on “improving food security”.

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda urged fellow leaders to release excess stockpiles of food to ease shortages in poorer countries, offering more than 300,000 tonnes of imported rice held by Japan.

The president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, voiced disappointment with the UN food body.

“We can’t continue to be helped like beggars,” he said. “I have been disappointed ... Don’t keep imposing institutions (and) experts on us. Africa is not what it was 20 years ago. Stop this farce.”

The summit opened amid controversy over the presence of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, whose attendance at the talks was described as “obscene” by Britain’s International Development Minister Douglas Alexander.

Mugabe defied the criticism when he took the podium at the meeting, claiming that Britain was seeking to “cripple Zimbabwe’s economy and thereby effect illegal regime change in our country”.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meanwhile slammed the West over its handling of the food crisis, accusing certain “big powers” of acting with sometimes “devilish” motives.

He also questioned whether the crisis should be handled within the UN system at all. “How can the mechanism of the UN improve the situation when some of these powers decide for the Security Council which is the highest decision-making body and make instrumental use of it?” he said.—Agencies