The international community is gathering in Italy for World Food Day on Tuesday with a round of UN-hosted talks on how to keep global food prices in check and help prevent future commodity market crises. "Food prices are too volatile and are dangerously high," Olivier De Schutter, the UN's rapporteur on the right to food, said ahead of the meeting.
De Schutter called for "immediate" action to help stabilise prices. The Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations is holding a week-long meeting of the Committee on World Food Security, which is made up of UN officials, farming experts and civil society representatives.
The latest UN data from earlier this month shows some 870 million people - around one in eight people in the world - are starving or under-nourished. That figure is considerably down from the 1990s when there were a billion hungry but still "far too high", according to FAO chief Jose Graziano da Silva.
There have also been market tensions this year after top producers like Europe, Russia and the Black Sea region revised down production forecasts, even though a crisis in the United States due to the drought never materialised.
Global food prices rose by 1.4 percent in September after holding steady for two months as cereals, meat and dairy prices climbed, according to FAO's Food Price Index, which is still far off the record it reached in February 2011.