The United Nation's agency responsible for relieving hunger in the world is drawing up plans to ration food aid in response to the spiralling cost of agricultural commodities, its director told the Financial Times newspaper Monday, according to dpa. Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP), told the Financial Times that the agency would look at "cutting the food rations or even the number or people reached" if donors did not provide more money. "Our ability to reach people is going down just as the needs go up," she said. WFP officials hope the cuts can be avoided, but warned that the agency's budget requirements were rising by several million dollars a week because of climbing food prices. The WFP sees the emergence of a "new area of hunger" in developing countries where even middle-class, urban people are being "priced out of the food market" because of rising food prices. The warning suggests that the price jump in agricultural commodities - such as wheat, corn, rice and soya beans - is having a wider impact than thought, hitting countries that have previously largely escaped hunger. "We are seeing a new face of hunger in which people are being priced out of the food market," said Sheeran. Hunger is now "affecting a wide range of countries", she said, pointing to Indonesia, Yemen and Mexico. "Situations that were previously not urgent - they are now." The main focus of the WFP to date has been to provide aid in areas where food was unavailable. But the programme now faced having to help countries where the price of food, rather than shortages, is the problem. Sheeran said that in response to rising food costs, families in developing countries were moving in some cases from three meals a day to just one, or dropping a diverse diet to rely on one staple food. In response to increasing food prices, Egypt had widened its food rationing system for the first time in two decades while Pakistan had reintroduced a ration card system that was abandoned in the mid- 1980s. Countries such as China and Russia were imposing price controls while others, such as Argentina and Vietnam, were enforcing foreign sales taxes or export bans, said the Financial Times. Food prices were rising on a mix of strong demand from developing countries, a rising global population, more frequent floods and droughts caused by climate change and the bio-fuel industry's appetite for grains, according to analysts cited by the Financial Times.
