AP

“THE world's most vulnerable who spend 60% of their income on food have been priced out of the food market,” is the alarming warning from Josette Sheeran, head of the United Nations' World Food Programme (WFP). As the price of wheat, maize, corn and other commodities that make up the world's basic foodstuffs is soaring the poorest people in the poorest countries are the hardest hit. And as prices shoot up helping them is getting tougher too. The WFP's food costs increased by more than 50% over the past five years. Ms Sheeran predicts that they will increase by another 35% in the next couple of years too.

For many years the least developed nations have worried about food security, especially countries at war and those battling droughts and other climatic hardships. Meanwhile the world's richest nations have produced more than enough for their needs and spent more time and effort worrying about the problems related to an abundance of food. These range from the health risks associated with ballooning rates of obesity to subsidies for uncompetitive farmers, particularly from the European Union. Despite efforts to tackle spending on farm subsidies, over 40% of the entire EU budget still goes towards supporting agriculture.

“Until two years ago we had too much food, but it was badly and unequally distributed,” says Abdolreza Abbassian, secretary of the intergovernmental group for grains trade at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), a UN agency. Today about 850m people, mostly women and children, remain chronically hungry while 1.1 billion are obese or overweight.

Food is scarcer now thanks to market liberalisation, which helped to cut excess production and lower stocks. At the same time demand for grains and other food commodities has shot up in China, India and other countries with rapidly growing economies. The biofuel industry is gobbling up an increasing share of the corn and sugar crops. And this year floods and droughts around the world destroyed much of the harvest in countries such as Britain, which had one of the wettest years in recent history, and Australia, which had one of the driest.

Concern about the cost of food is even spreading beyond the world's poor countries. Last month Italians took to the street in Rome and Milan to protest against an increase in pasta prices. They are eating less too: Italians' pasta and bread consumption dropped 7.4% and milk consumption fell by 2.6% in the first eight months of the year according to Coldiretti, a farmers' association.

Efforts to find solutions have been complicated by political manipulation. This month the Russian government introduced price controls in the run-up to parliamentary elections in December. This will temporarily help the country's poor but leave them more exposed to the impact of price increases after controls are lifted. Jacques Diouf, head of the FAO, predicts that more countries will introduce food-price controls while others will scrap import tariffs on food or increase subsidies for food production.

And efforts to alleviate one problem, finding an alternative to oil, has brought strong condemnation from a proponent of another, feeding the world's starving poor. Jean Ziegler, the UN's independent expert on the right to food, calls the growing use of crops to replace petrol as a crime against humanity and wants a five-year moratorium on biofuel production.

Periods of high prices followed by times of low prices are common in agricultural markets. What makes the current cycle different from previous periods of high prices is the rise has hit nearly all food commodities. In the past farmers producing a plentiful crop attracting low prices would switch to one in shorter supply that would earn them more. And stocks are so tight at the moment that there is not much of a buffer if bad weather next year effects crops again, according to the FAO's Mr Abassian.

Prices will probably remain high for the next year or two while the world is adapting to food scarcity. What happens next will reveal the resilience of the world's food-supply system, predicts Ms Sheeran. Her programme, she says, is battling with a host of adverse circumstances. In addition to higher prices for food the WFP has to cope with climatic change, a rapidly increasing world population and the decline in the rich world's aid budgets. Ms Sheeran refers to this as the post food-surplus era. The fat probably won't get any thinner but the effects on the world's poorest and hungriest could be devastating.