Rich countries came under attack yesterday at the United Nations food summit for their biofuel subsidies and production targets, declining spending on development aid for agriculture and large subsidies to European and US farmers. Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, told heads of state and governments gathered in Rome that "nobody" understood why cereals had been diverted from human consumption "mostly to satisfy a thirst for fuel vehicles".

Abu Dhabi is preparing to launch a large-scale agricultural project in Sudan to develop more than 70,000 acres of land as part of the oil-rich Gulf emirate's efforts to secure food supplies. The project comes amid growing interest from Middle Eastern states to use land overseas to ensure food security. Saudi Arabia and Egypt have also held talks with Sudan and are considering agricultural projects of their own in Africa's largest nation, officials confirmed yesterday.

Predictions of food crisis are getting direr, forcing countries to take extraordinary measures (see

The current food crisis has been largely policy-driven, which is probably good news because it means that policies can also reverse the process.

India and Egypt are on course to rebuild their ties by adding solid economic content to their relationship. The visiting Minister of state for commerce and power Jairam Ramesh held talks with Prime Minister of Egypt Ahmed Mahmoud Mohamed Nazif. He also met the Ministers of investment, communications and information technology, finance, transport as well as trade and industry. These meetings took place on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum (Middle East) where Mr. Ramesh is representing India as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's special envoy.

Averting a full-blown global food crisis calls for long-term steps

Fiona Marshal and her international team of archaeologists were not really expecting to find donkeys while excavating a royal burial site in Egypt. For good reason. No animal has ever been found

For years, food policy in the Middle East and North Africa was very simple: hydrocarbon exports paid for carbohydrate imports. Rising agricultural commodities prices and a large population increase mean that the traditional policy is now untenable even if crude oil trades at about $120 a barrel, forcing countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia, to reconsider how it feeds its population. "The region has woken up to the new food market reality," says Abdolreza Abbassian, an expert at the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome.

When Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, was asked to ponder the future of the world before an audience of powerful businessmen and politicians, at a meeting in Switzerland earlier this year, he could have chosen any topic he liked. What he focused on was both a hoary old favourite, and a newly popular preoccupation, of debates on world affairs: the rising risk of wars over fresh water, as populations increase and the world gets drier.

Egypt is to review its food subsidy system as it seeks ways to tackle rising inflation, which reached 14.2 per cent in March. Youssef Boutros-Ghali, finance minister, told the Financial Times that the government would look to raise additional revenues through new taxes or increasing existing taxes. However, he said corporate taxes, which were reduced in recent years as part of wider economic reforms, would not be altered, adding that no tariffs that impacted "on profit and production" would be increased.