Maywood Market exemplifies grocery stores' struggles in 'food deserts'

Owner worries about its survival, vows not to give up

Maywood's lonely Maywood Market, with only one person shopping at the time of the photograph. (Benjamin Chernivsky/Chicago Tribune)

By Serena Maria Daniels, Tribune reporter

September 5, 2011

Maywood Market opened with great fanfare, billed as an oasis amid a "food desert" in this west suburb, where fresh fruits and vegetables were hard to find.

Despite the hopes of community leaders and health advocates, one item remains in short supply more than a year later — shoppers pushing carts brimming with food.

Gates joins Ford, Kellogg to transform food policy after unrest

This article highlights a new attempt from major business leaders to solve the problems in our food system.  As you read it, consider some of the causes of the problems that the article highlights and what must be done to keep our system out of crisis.  For anyone who's interested, here's the original link:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/05/04/gates-joins-ford-kellogg-to-transform-food-policy-after-unrest/?refid=0

Gates joins Ford, Kellogg to transform food policy after unrest

May 4, 2011

(Bloomberg) — Foundations supported by Bill Gates and the Ford, Kellogg and Walton families are combining to relieve stresses on the food supply that are pushing prices higher and adding to unrest around the globe.

"Food policy is too important just to be left to people in the food industry," former U.S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said today at an event in Washington to launch the so- called AGree intitiative, a long-term effort to raise farm production and smooth out price increases. "For too long, food and farm policy have been related to a narrow of range of interests," said Glickman, one of the program's leaders.

Costlier food has contributed to riots across northern Africa and the Middle East that toppled leaders in Egypt and Tunisia. Higher prices also helped drive 44 million people into poverty in the past year and another 10 million may join them should a United Nations food index rise another 10 percent, the World Bank said April 16.

In the U.S., food prices may increase by as much as 4 percent this year, the most since 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Panera Bread Co., a St. Louis-based restaurant chain, and Golden Valley-based General Mills Inc., the maker of Wheaties, plan to raise prices after wheat traded in Chicago soared 57 percent in the past year. McDonald's Corp. Chief Financial Officer Peter Bensen said last month that the company will probably raise prices to help counter the surge in ingredient costs.

Kraft Foods Inc., based in Northfield, Illinois, increased U.S. prices on Maxwell House and Yuban ground coffees by about 22 percent in March. Orrville, Ohio-based J.M. Smucker Co., maker of Folgers coffee, raised prices by 10 percent in February.

Tyson Foods Inc. and other meat processors have faced higher feed costs as corn and soybean prices advanced to their highest levels since 2008. Corn and soybean meal represent 42 percent of Tyson's cost of raising chicken, which made up 34 percent of its sales in 2010, according to the company.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization's index of 55 food commodities dropped 3 percent in March, although the FAO predicted prices would rebound to new records. Prices have rallied since late March when the USDA said domestic corn stockpiles at the start of the month fell to their lowest since 2007 and soybean inventories shrank to the smallest since 2003.

World grain production in 2010-2011 is forecast to drop 1.1 percent to 2.24 billion metric tons, the UN agency said last month. Cereal usage is estimated at 2.28 billion tons, exceeding production. The UN raised its projection for ending stockpiles by 1.7 million tons to 479 million tons.

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the McKnight Foundation also are backing the initiative.

Frogurt!

I chose this article because I love frogurt and Athens seems to have its fair share of frogurt shops. Also, since we just finished watching a film about what goes into our food, I thought it would be a good time to think about what goes into frogurt. A lot of people think it's a health food, I've never been under such dillusions, but a great many people consider it a health food. Next time I go to Yofori, I'd like to read their label more closely and see what's in their frogurt; I eat theirs the most. I'm not sure about the paragraph about religion, but the overall article is enlightening, especially for the city Athens which has more frogurt shops than I can count.


http://www.naturalnews.com/029038_frozen_yogurt_health_food.html
 
(NaturalNews) It did not even occur to me that people thought frozen yogurt was a "health food" until I spent some time in the USA. There, people line up in droves at frozen yogurt stores to buy a junk food that they're convinced is good for them. And why is it good for them, in their own minds? Because it's "yogurt."

I actually went to the trouble of visiting a line of people at a frozen yogurt store and asking several people there if they could name the ingredients in the frozen yogurt they were buying. Not one of them could. Most just said, "Yogurt." (Are you detecting a pattern here?)

Upon further investigation, I found that frozen yogurt retailers don't make it very easy for you to find out what's actually in their products in the first place. They don't printing redientson the products they sell, and even their websites make it virtually impossible to find this information.

After some digging, I was able to find the ingredients of the vanilla yogurt powder that's used in one of the nation's most famous frozen yogurt chains. Here's what's in it:

Pure Crystalline Fructose, Dextrose, Maltodextrin, Non-fat Milk, Yogurt Powder, Micro-encapsulated Probiotic (Lactobacillus Sporogenes)

Did you catch all that? The first three ingredients are all sugars, followed by processed cow's milk. Maltodextrin, in particular, has a glycemic index so high that it's practically poison to diabetics. It's often derived from genetically-modified corn, by the way.

As you can see from the ingredients list,frozen yogurt is basically just ice cream with some yogurt powder thrown in. It's ice cream with probiotics.

That doesn't make it healthy food. It's still junk food, but with probiotic powder.

The illusion of healthy food
If I throw probiotics on a pizza, it doesn't turn the pizza into healthy cuisine. If I slap probiotics on a cheeseburger, it doesn't make it a healthy cheeseburger. So why do so many people believe that mixing in a little probiotic powder with ice cream suddenly makes it a "health food?"

The answer? Because they want to.

Frozen yogurt shops don't deliver healthy food, but they do deliver the illusion of healthy food. And in America today, where illusion dominates reality, that's good enough!

People aren't really interested in what they're eating, you see. They just want to be convincingly persuaded that whatever they're swallowing is somehow good for them. That's sufficient evidence in their minds to go ahead and start chowing down.

It's much the same with popular religion in the USAtoday. Few people really believe in God even if they claim to, because if they did, they wouldn't go out and destroy their God-given bodies with alcohol, cigarettes, booze, drugs and junk food. They don't really want to authentically believe in God, you see, because that would require a whole different level of personal discipline to act in a way that honored their beliefs(and honored their body as a temple). If you destroy your health with junk food, your actions scream to the universe that you really don't follow God's will at all.

What was that part in the Bible about gluttony? I don't often quote scripture, but it's relevant here:Proverbs 23:20-21 "Be not among winebibbers; among riotous eaters of flesh: For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags."

What people want in America today is junk food, junk news, junk knowledge and junk beliefs. They don't really believe much of anything except those simple spoon-fed beliefs that happen to coincide with the self-destructive lifestyle they wanted to pursue anyway. Life is an all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-smoke, all-you-can-drink orgy! So let's call it "reduced-calorie" dessert and get on with it, shall we?

People pick their beliefs, in other words, to try to justify their actions. Any belief that contradicts their short-term desires will be modified, pushed aside or simply overwritten with some other belief that allows them the excuse to pursue immediate satisfaction. The false belief that "frozen yogurt is health food" serves this purpose nicely.

Why would you swallow something if you don't know what's in it?
Most people, by the way, don't even examine what they eat in the first place. They just shovel it down without a thought.

It was the Greek philosopher Socrates who famously said, "An unexamined life is not worth living." My modern version of this quote in the realm of health is, "An unexamined diet is not worth eating."

And yet people almost never examine what they eat. They chew and swallow blindly, giving less thought to what they put inside their bodies than the clothes they we are outside their bodies.

Actually, they choose their foods from the perspective of entertainment. What taste and texture will be entertaining right now? What will give my taste buds pleasure in this instant, regardless of the lifelong effects of this substance on my body?

What sugars, fats or chemical taste enhancers can I place on my tongue in this instant that will provide some level of sensory experience to my brain and remind me that I'm still alive?

That's the real essence of it, you see. People are sleepwalking through our world half dead, and what they really seek is just stimulationto remind them that they aren't dead yet. Almost any stimulation will do: The loud blaring of speakers at a rock concert, the sexual foreplay with a new partner, the rush of an abused prescription drug, the thrill of a horror movie, the sensory engrossment of a violent video game, the stimulant kick of a Coca-Cola... it hardly matters as long as something is being felt through the numbness of emotional trauma that typifies human experience in our modern world.

The numbed-up, dumbed-down metrosexual seeker of experience is actually a biological stimulation machine with a tiny unit of consciousness tacked on top that's seeking a heavy hit of just about anything to remind himself that he still exists. "I feel, therefore I am," to bastardize Descartes' famous utterance.

But what do we really feel when we pursue a life of delusional junk foods and other false stimulation? We only feel further numbed from reality; numbed from our own bodies, numbed to our spirituality and numbed to the consciousness that would give our lives purpose rather than processed probiotic powder.

In pursuing a life of junk consumption, what becomes frozen is not merely our yogurt but our entire experience of life. Frozen yogurt is perhaps the perfect food metaphor for what's happening in American culture today: The mass consumption of a self-destructive lie that offers a brief moment of satisfaction followed by a lifetime of disease.


Learn more:http://www.naturalnews.com/029038_frozen_yogurt_health_food.html#ixzz1XPlge47t

Sugary drinks add 300 calories a day to youths' diets

Sugary drinks add 300 calories a day to youths' diets

Teens who drink soda, energy drinks and other sugary beverages are guzzling about 327 calories a day from them, which is equal to about 2½ cans of cola, new government data show.

• 

  Tim Boyle, Getty Images

  About 52% of sugary drinks are consumed at home; 48% away from home.

Enlarge

Tim Boyle, Getty Images

About 52% of sugary drinks are consumed at home; 48% away from home.

And people ages 20-39 who drink sugary beverages consume 336 calories a day from them.

Some people are getting a lot of their daily calories from the drinks, says Cynthia Ogden, an epidemiologist with the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which conducted the research.

The latest analysis shows that half of people in the USAdrink sugary beverages on any given day, and about 25% consume at least 200 calories a day from them. About 5% of people ages 2 and older consume at least 567 calories a day from such drinks.

That's a national problem, nutrition experts say. "Sugar-sweetened beverages are the No. 1 single source of calories in the American diet and account for about half of all added sugars that people consume," says Rachel Johnson, a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association and a nutrition professor at theUniversity of Vermont.

Ogden says that "the reason we are interested in sugary drinks is they are associated with a variety of conditions including obesity and type 2 diabetes."

Barry Popkin, a nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, says consumption of super-caffeinated energy drinks, especially among teens and young adults, is skyrocketing. "These are empty calories with no health benefits."

The new findings are from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which is considered the gold standard for evaluating food and beverage habits because the data come from in-person interviews about dietary habits. The results are from more than 17,000 interviews conducted from 2005 to 2008.

The drinks with added sugar in the analysis included sodas, energy drinks, sports drinks, fruit drinks and sweetened bottled waters. Not included: diet drinks, coffee, 100% fruit juice, sweetened teas and flavored milks.

The heart association advises people to consume no more than 36 ounces or about 450 calories from sugary beverages a week. "It's better if you can avoid them altogether and instead consume water, fat-free or 1% fat milk, 100% fruit juice and low-sodium vegetable juices," Johnson says.

Christopher Gindlesperger, director of communications for the American Beverage Association, points out that another recent government study shows sugar-sweetened beverages are playing a declining role in the American diet, even as obesity is increasing.

"People are drinking fewer full-calorie, sugar-sweetened beverages due to industry innovation in bringing no- and low-calorie beverages to the market," he says.

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/nyregion/greenmarkets-in-city-will-feel-storms-effects-on-regions-produce.html?scp=7&sq=food&st=cse

Where Storm Takes Food Off Tables

Ángel Franco/The New York Times

The Union Square Greenmarket is expected to have fewer offerings because Tropical Storm Irene damaged an estimated 140,000 acres of farmland in New York State alone.

By ADRIANE QUINLAN

Published: September 2, 2011

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The farmers’ market at the Whitehall Terminal of the Staten Island Ferry will have no heirloom tomatoes from Wilklow Orchards in upstate New York. Mike Betit, a farmer from Vermont, will not be taking summer squash to the Union Square Greenmarket, and Hector Tejada, another New York farmer, will not show up at all this fall at the markets in Union Square or Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

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All 12 acres of Mr. Tejada’s farm in New Paltz were flooded. “I lost everything,” he said, adding that he had laid off his two workers and gotten a job at a nearby farm that was spared.

With Tropical Storm Irene having inundated many farms in New York, New Jersey and Vermont, the greenmarkets that have become a weekend staple for many New York City residents and a daily stalwart for chefs will have a little less green.

Winds strong enough to topple cornstalks, and floods high enough to drown entire farms, have changed the kinds of food that New Yorkers who “buy local” will find.

“We have no idea what we’re going to do,” said Maritza Wellington Owens, the founder of Harvest Home, a group that runs farmers’ markets in low-income areas. “We might have to shut markets down. It just might come to that.”

Some regulars say they depend on the greenmarkets to supply their businesses. “It’s devastating for them, and consequently it’s devastating for us,” Mary Cleaver said of the vendors she relies on to stock her farm-to-table restaurant in Chelsea, the Green Table, with Hudson Valley fruit for its harvest salad.

Ms. Cleaver was shopping for peaches at the Union Square Greenmarket, which on Friday seemed as well stocked as ever.

But even there, some of the regular vendors said they would be unable to offer their usual goods.

A Vermont farm, Consider Bardwell, will probably have no more fresh goat cheese to sell at Union Square by Monday. The stress of the storm meant that the goats produced less milk.

The market in Fort Greene will not have its usual spread of heirloom tomatoes from Wilklow Orchards in Ulster County, including black princes and white beauties. The farm’s entire nine acres of tomatoes were washed away.

“My dad doesn’t even want to look at it, he’s too upset,” said Becky Wilklow, 24, who works on the farm. “It’s hard to make money being a smaller farm, and the greenmarket is really nice.”

For many of the small, family-run farms that supply farmers’ markets, the storm could mean financial ruin. “This is the peak of our season,” said Adina Bialas, who runs J & A Farm in Goshen, N.Y., with her husband, Jeff, and saw most of their 10-acre farm submerged. “At the end of August, September and October, that’s when we see our income.”

The fallout from the storm at the city’s greenmarkets is wide and somewhat random. Many of the smaller farms grow a wide array of produce, only some of which was touched by floodwater, and each lost something different. And those who lost everything may still be at markets this weekend, selling what they picked before the storm hit.

Michael Hurwitz, director of the greenmarket program at GrowNYC, which runs 53 markets in the city, estimated that 10 percent of the farmers he works with were affected by the storm.

“There are at least 13 — probably 15 to 20 — that come from the black dirt,” Mr. Hurwitz said, referring to a farming region in Orange County, N.Y. “We know their farms are underwater.”

In all, the storm damaged 140,000 acres of New York farmland, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said.

Adding to some farmers’ concern is a federal guideline stipulating that any crops exposed to floodwater should be considered contaminated and unfit for human consumption.

“You get a lot of nasty things in floodwater,” said Michael Moran, a spokesman for the State Department of Agriculture.

Ms. Bialas worried about the prospect of having to discard produce even if it might not be contaminated. “Do you play the safe route and go bankrupt and go out of business?” she said.

Organizations that operate farmers’ markets in poorer neighborhood worry that farmers with limited supplies after the storm might choose to sell at those greenmarkets where they could charge a higher price.

“They need to go where they’re going to make the maximum value for their product,” said Jacquie Berger, the executive director of Just Food, another group that runs markets in poorer neighborhoods.

In low-income neighborhoods where obesity is a problem, farmers’ markets offerings are often some of the healthiest food.

“People have limited options to buy fresh, nutritious food, and farmers’ markets play an important role in meeting that need,” Kim Kessler, the food policy coordinator for the Bloomberg administration, said in an e-mail.

Ms. Owens, who started Harvest Home, said the decimation of so many farms might make New Yorkers better appreciate the “connection between the food that’s on their table and what’s happening on the farms.”

“It might be a wake-up call, she said, “to show how dependent we are on our farming community.”

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/29-4

Published on Monday, August 29, 2011 by The Wall Street Journal

Monsanto Corn Plant Losing Bug Resistance

by Scott Kilman

Widely grown corn plants that Monsanto Co. genetically modified to thwart a voracious bug are falling prey to that very pest in a few Iowa fields, the first time a major Midwest scourge has developed resistance to a genetically modified crop.

Corn earworm larva feasting on a corn ear. Iowa State University entomologist Aaron Gassmann's discovery that western corn rootworms in four northeast Iowa fields have evolved to resist the natural pesticide made by Monsanto's corn plant could encourage some farmers to switch to insect-proof seeds sold by competitors of the St. Louis crop biotechnology giant, and to return to spraying harsher synthetic insecticides on their fields.The discovery raises concerns that the way some farmers are using biotech crops could spawn superbugs.

Iowa State University entomologist Aaron Gassmann's discovery that western corn rootworms in four northeast Iowa fields have evolved to resist the natural pesticide made by Monsanto's corn plant could encourage some farmers to switch to insect-proof seeds sold by competitors of the St. Louis crop biotechnology giant, and to return to spraying harsher synthetic insecticides on their fields.

"These are isolated cases, and it isn't clear how widespread the problem will become," said Dr. Gassmann in an interview. "But it is an early warning that management practices need to change."

The finding adds fuel to the race among crop biotechnology rivals to locate the next generation of genes that can protect plants from insects. Scientists at Monsanto andSyngenta AG of Basel, Switzerland, are already researching how to use a medical breakthrough called RNA interference to, among other things, make crops deadly for insects to eat. If this works, a bug munching on such a plant could ingest genetic code that turns off one of its essential genes.

Monsanto said its rootworm-resistant corn seed lines are working as it expected "on more than 99% of the acres planted with this technology" and that it is too early to know what the Iowa State University study means for farmers.

The discovery comes amid a debate about whether the genetically modified crops that now saturate the Farm Belt are changing how some farmers operate in undesirable ways.

These insect-proof and herbicide-resistant crops make farming so much easier that many growers rely heavily on the technology, violating a basic tenet of pest management, which warns that using one method year after year gives more opportunity for pests to adapt.

Monsanto is already at the center of this issue because of its success since the 1990s marketing seeds that grow into crops that can survive exposure to its Roundup herbicide, a glyphosate-based chemical known for its ability to kill almost anything green.

These seeds made it so convenient for farmers to spray Roundup that many farmers stopped using other weedkillers. As a result, say many scientists, superweeds immune to Roundup have spread to millions of acres in more than 20 states in the South and Midwest.

Monsanto became the first company to sell rootworm-resistant biotech corn to farmers in 2003. The seed contains a gene from a common soil microorganism called Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, from which crop biotechnology has been used to mine several genes for making insecticidal proteins.

One of the genes Monsanto developed makes a crystalline protein called Cry3Bb1. It rips apart the gut of the rootworm but is harmless to mammals, birds and most beneficial insects. Competitors, which use other Bt genes to attack the rootworm, estimate that roughly one-third of the corn grown in the U.S. carries Monsanto's Cry3Bb1 gene.

Monsanto said it generated world-wide sales of $4.26 billion from corn seed and biotechnology traits, about 40% of its overall sales, in its last full year.

Until insecticide-producing corn plants arrived, Midwest farmers typically tried to keep pests like the corn borer and the rootworm in check by changing what they grew in a field each year, often rotating between corn and soybeans. That way, the offspring of corn-loving insects would starve the next year.

Some farmers began to plant corn in the same field year after year. The financial incentive to grow corn has increased in recent years in part because the ethanol-fuel industry's exploding appetite for corn has helped to lift prices to very profitable levels for growers.

According to Dr. Gassmann, the Iowa fields in which he found rootworms resistant to the Cry3Bb1 toxin had been producing Monsanto's Bt-expressing corn continuously for at least three years. Dr. Gassmann collected rootworm beetles from four Iowa cornfields with plant damage in 2009. Their larvae were then fed corn containing Monsanto's Cry3Bb1 toxin. They had a survival rate three times that of control larvae that ate the same corn.

Dr. Gassmann found that Monsanto's Bt toxin still had some lethal impact on the larvae from the problem Iowa fields, and that the bugs were still highly susceptible to a rootworm-resistant corn plant from a competitor that uses a different Bt toxin, called Cry34/35Ab1.

Scientists in other Farm Belt states are also looking for signs that Monsanto's Bt corn might be losing its effectiveness. Mike Gray, a University of Illinois entomologist, said he is studying rootworm beetles he collected in northwest Illinois earlier this month from fields where Monsanto's Bt-expressing corn had suffered extensive rootworm damage.

The government requires that farmers who plant the genetically modified corn take certain steps aimed at preventing insects from developing resistance. Farmers are told to create a refuge for the bugs by planting non-modified corn in part of their fields. The refuge, which can be as much as 20% of a farmer's field, is supposed to reduce the chances that two toxin-resistant bugs mate and pass along that trait to their offspring.

Dr. Gray said the confirmation of toxin-resistant rootworms in Iowa could force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to revisit its policy of allowing the size of these insect refuges to shrink to as little as 5% of a cornfield as crop biotechnology companies begin to sell seed for corn plants that can make two different rootworm-killing toxins.

Part of what has attracted some farmers to Monsanto's new SmartStax corn line is that it allows them to plant a smaller refuge. But one of the two anti-rootworm toxins in that variety is the Cry3Bb1 protein at the center of Dr. Gassmann's study.

The EPA said it is too early to comment on any implications arising from Dr. Gassmann's paper.

© 2011 The Wall Street Journal

Food prices hit "dangerous levels": World Bank chief

Tue, Feb 15 2011

By Lesley Wroughton

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - World Bank chief Robert Zoellick on Tuesday said global food prices have reached "dangerous levels," and warned that their impact could complicate fragile political and social conditions in the Middle East and Central Asia.

World Bank data released on Tuesday showed higher food prices -- mainly for wheat, maize, sugars and edible oils - have pushed 44 million more people in developing countries into extreme poverty since June 2010.

"There is no room for complacency," Zoellick told a conference call. "Global food prices are now at dangerous levels and it is also clear that recent food price rises are causing pain and suffering for poor people around the globe."

Zoellick said although higher food prices were not the main cause leading to recent protests in Egypt and Tunisia, it was an aggravating factor and could become worse.

He warned that a sharp rise in food prices across Central Asia could also have social and political implications for that region.

The World Bank report comes days before a meeting of the Group of 20 major economies in France where higher food prices and the reasons for those upward spikes will be discussed.

Zoellick also said he was concerned that as countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and Jordan address causes of their social upheaval, higher food prices may add to "the fragility that is always there any time you have revolutions and transitions."

The World Bank chief said the international community needed to be aware of such risks and should not exacerbate problems by imposing policies, such as export bans or price fixing, that would push global food prices even higher.

"There is no silver bullet to resolving the potent combination of rising and volatile food prices," Zoellick said, "but food security is now a global security issue."

Catastrophic storms and droughts have hurt the world's leading agriculture-producing countries, including flooding and a massive cyclone in Australia, major winter storms in the United States, and fires last year in Russia.

Zoellick said a World Bank team was currently in Tunisia taking a closer look at the country's transition and assessing possible financing needs, including for food assistance.

He suggested that Egypt may not need World Bank funds because its financing situation "is one that should be able to be managed" over the short term.

NOT THE SAME EVERYWHERE

The Washington-based poverty-fighting institution said its food price index increased by 15 percent between October 2010 and January 2011 and is just 3 percent below its 2008 peak during the last food price crisis. This translates into a 29 percent rise in food prices over the course of a year.

But unlike during the 2007-08 food crisis, higher prices have not yet affected all regions of the world.

Across Asia and in some parts of Latin America, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, costlier food is pushing up inflationary pressures.

"Central Asia is a region where these good prices have increased substantially and given the poverty levels ... there is a real stress point that could have social and political implications," Zoellick said.

Meanwhile, good harvests in Sub-Saharan Africa have so far spared that region from rising prices.

But he said it was disturbing to see maize prices soar about 73 percent over six months, while prices for sugar for fats and oils have risen 20 percent and 22 percent, respectively, in the past quarter alone.

The World Bank cautioned that rice prices needed monitoring given measures by some countries to significantly import more rice to boost domestic stocks.

He said there was less margin for error in Africa because of high poverty rates across the region, although he noted problems in Burundi and Cameroon where bean prices, an important food source, have risen by more than 40 percent.

Surveys show that the poor spend more than 80 percent of their total disposable income on basic foods, and if prices rise, poor families have few -- if any -- alternative but to eat less.

The bank said rich donor countries needed to focus food aid on countries such as Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia, which face acute food price spikes.

The bank said the international community should take steps to calm jittery commodity markets and urged poor nations to scale up social programs to protect the poor.

It said countries that are large net commodity importers with low international foreign exchange reserves and limited space in their budgets may need funding help.

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