Development ministers from around the globe today called for urgent action to stem soaring food prices, warning that social unrest will spread unless the cost of basic staples is contained.
Top development officials who gathered today for a meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank's joint Development Committee also called for action to address climate change. They urged the World Bank to mobilize financing to help the poorest nations deal with threats from global warming.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick and British prime minister Gordon Brown have said the issue of skyrocketing food prices needs to be front and centre at the highest political level in every country, and Mr Brown said he would raise it at meetings of the Group of Eight (G8) powerful nations.
Indian finance minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said rising food and energy costs threatened to stir more social unrest.
"It is becoming starker by the day that unless we act fast for a global consensus on the price spiral, the social unrest induced by food prices in several countries will conflagrate into a global contagion, leaving no country - developed or otherwise - unscathed," he said.
"The global community must collectively deliberate on immediate steps to reverse the unconscionable increases in the price of food, which threatens to negate the benefits to the poor nations from aid, trade and debt relief," he said.
Douglas Alexander, Britain's minister for international development, said his country is willing to work with others to bring prices down.
"Much has been said this week about rising food prices, but now is the time for urgent action to tackle the crisis, which is affecting millions of the poorest people across the globe," he said.
Mr Alexander also pointed to higher fuel costs and said it was important that global oil supplies "are sufficient to ensure the market has flexibility to respond to potential supply shocks and changes in demand."
The World Bank has warned that the rise in food prices is not a temporary phenomenon and has said prices are likely to remain elevated this year and next before moving lower, and that they will likely remain above 2004 levels through 2015.
Concerns about rising food costs took on new urgency as senators in Haiti ousted prime minister Jacques Edouard Alexis after a week of food-related rioting in which at least five people were killed. There have also been protests in Cameroon, Niger and Burkina Faso in Arica, and in Indonesia and the Philippines.
In just two months, rice prices have closed in on historic highs, rising by around 75 per cent globally and by even more in some markets. Meanwhile, the cost of wheat has climbed by 120 per cent over the past year, more than doubling the price of a loaf of bread in most poor countries, the World Bank said.