Food crisis seen offering opportunity for Africa

YOKOHAMA, Japan (Reuters) - Urgent action is needed to help the poor who are devastated by soaring food prices, but Africa, with sufficient help, faces an opportunity and can become a solution to the global food crisis, the World Bank and U.N. agencies said on Thursday.

Spikes in food prices have been one of the key topics discussed at the fourth round of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), to which Japan has attracted some 40 leaders from Africa where the food crisis has led to riots in some countries.

"Record high prices of food and fuel are a painful pinch for consumers all over the world. But for those who are living on less than a dollar a day, it's devastating," said Josette Sheeran, executive director for the World Food Program (WFP), adding that Africa was by far the hardest hit.

"We heard today from leaders of Africa that urgent action is needed," she told a joint news conference with other global aid agencies after talks among African delegates and the donor community on high food prices on the sidelines of TICAD.

The world has seen a huge jump in food prices, blamed on a "perfect storm" of factors including increased demand from rapidly developing countries India and China, growth in biofuels production and oil prices' impact on costs.

While supermarket prices have risen in richer nations, the effect is much harsher in developing countries where people spend more than 50 percent of their income on food. The impact of the food crisis is pushing an additional 130 million people into hunger.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick told the same news conference that a food crisis summit in Rome next week should send clear signals on what action to take.

Such action should include providing funding without earmarks or restrictions and financial resources to give seeds and fertilizer to small farms in Africa to boost output, he said.

The World Bank is also setting up a facility this week to provide more rapid financial assistance and adding substantially more grant funds, and also looking into the possibility of a trust fund that could be used for these purposes, he added.

CHALLENGE AND OPPORTUNITY

African delegates at TICAD were worried, calling for global action on the food crisis and looking for more investment, especially for infrastructure that could help better transport food and aid on the continent.

"Among the main factors that hinder human security nowadays is the food crisis, the most dramatic visage of the current global crisis," Cape Verde Island's president, Pedro Rodrigues Pires, told delegates on Wednesday.

"The food crisis, for its cause and dimension, calls for a multilateral approach and an integrated solution."

Still, international aid agencies said rising food prices offered an opportunity, not just a challenge.

"We're at a time where this also presents an opportunity for Africa, because Africa has great potential to provide more food not only for itself but also for the world," Zoellick said.

The WFP's Sheeran chimed in.

"This is also a wake-up call. By the year 2050, the world needs to produce twice as much food to deal with growing demand. So I want to echo that this is a historic opportunity for the African farmers," she said. "We need African farmers to help solve this challenge and bring a prominent solution."

Japan, which chairs the Group of Eight meetings of rich nations this year, has made the food price crisis a key topic for the G8 leaders' summit in July. It has also sponsored the development of New Rice for Africa (NERICA), combining the yield and quality of Asian rice with the toughness of African rice.

"Agriculture development is an important method for eliminating poverty and developing the economy, and it can be said that agriculture is the essence of African development," Japan's farm minister, Masatoshi Wakabayashi, told the TICAD conference on Thursday.

(Editing by Chris Gallagher)