U.N. sees food prices unleashing silent tsunami

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - A "silent tsunami" unleashed by costlier food threatens 100 million people, the United Nations said on Tuesday, and aid groups said producers would make things worse if they curbed exports.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Britain would seek changes to EU biofuels targets if it was shown that planting crops for fuel was driving up food prices -- a day after the bloc stood by its plans to boost biofuel use.

The World Food Programme (WFP), whose head Josette Sheeran took part in a meeting of experts Brown called on Tuesday to discuss the crisis, said a "silent tsunami" threatened to plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger.

"This is the new face of hunger -- the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are," she said ahead of the meeting.

Riots in poor Asian and African countries have followed steep rises in food prices caused by many factors -- dearer fuel, bad weather, rising disposable incomes boosting demand and the conversion of land to grow crops for biofuel.

Rice from Thailand, the world's top exporter, has more than doubled in price this year. Major food exporters including Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Egypt and Cambodia have imposed curbs on food exports to secure supplies.

Sheeran said artificially created shortages aggravated the problem: "The world has been consuming more than it has been producing for the past three years, so stocks have been drawn down."

Rising prices meant the WFP was running short of money to buy food for its programmes and had already curtailed school feeding plans in Tajikistan, Kenya and Cambodia.