UNITED NATIONS, April 25: United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Friday that rising food prices had developed into a global crisis and the head of the World Food Programme issued a dire warning that global food price inflation could push another 100 million people worldwide more deeply into poverty.

“We are in a situation of making some heart-breaking choices where we’re really going through our programme and looking at where the greatest vulnerability is and which programmes we can keep whole until we can raise that full amount,” executive director of the World Food Programme Josette Sheeran said.

Soaring food prices -- up 55 per cent from June 2007 to February 2008, including an 87 per cent hike for rice in March -- and dwindling global food stocks due to more world food consumption than production were seriously threatening the WFP’s ability to keep millions from starvation, Ms Sheeran told journalists at the UN Headquarters during a video conference here from Rome.

In the coming weeks, core programmes -- which included food aid for Darfur, northern Uganda, Afghanistan and other places -- would begin to be cut if funding was insufficient.

The agency’s 2008 core budget of $3.1 billion covered the cost of just 60 per cent of the amount of food it could buy last year with the same contribution. And so far it had received just 63 per cent of the $755 million appealed for in February to close that gap.

“We’re now moving with the secretary-general and others to look at solutions and what the world and governments can offer at this time,” she said. At present, the agency’s most critical priority was to ensure food for people living on less than 50 cents a day, including internally displaced persons and refugees, particularly infants under age two.

In what she called the “new face of hunger”, many millions of people had become urgently in need of food in the past six months and many who had been vulnerable -- especially young children and pregnant women -- were now at risk of becoming permanently malnourished.

“We’re also concerned because this is not only an issue of hunger, but one of peace and stability as we’ve seen with more than 34 countries having protests and food riots in recent months,” she said.

People in industrialised countries spent about 15 per cent to 18 per cent of their household income on food, making them better equipped to cope with disasters and food price hikes than households in developing countries, which on average spent 70 per of their income on food. People most at risk -- rural landless peasants, small-scale farmers, the urban poor, children and mothers -- were eating less nutritious and fewer meals, as little as two or three per week in places like Burundi, and foregoing basic necessities such as health care and schooling.

The UN secretary-general has asked the WFP, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) to present their strategies at next week’s meeting in Switzerland of their executive boards.