The wave of food riots as far apart as the Caribbean and Asia has attracted headlines because for most news editors, more than one swallow does indeed make a summer -- and there have been an awful lot of them recently.

Egypt, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Madagascar and Haiti -- and that's just in the past month. In Pakistan and Thailand, troops have been deployed to protect food stores against looting.

Most recently, Philippines Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro was forced to deny reports riots were expected there amid rising food costs and with world rice prices hitting a 19-year high last month.

"We don't see any immediate threats to national security whether caused by this rice crisis or otherwise," he said at a Tuesday news conference, according to the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

But deep trends in global markets that show no sign of abating will continue to drive food prices up, say experts.

Demand for biofuel alternatives to $100 barrel oil will continue to require production of ethanol and drive up the price of maize. The changing tastes of the growing class of prosperous consumers in India and China will keep demand for grain high -- to feed livestock and dairy cattle. The burgeoning ranks of the poor in those countries will likely keep rice at last month's high.

And looming over all else is the threat the gradually worsening impact of global warming will begin to reduce cultivable acreage, as land becomes flood-prone or desertified.

U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization Director General Jacques Diouf said last week that world food prices had risen 45 percent in the last nine months and "there are serious shortages of rice, wheat and maize."

Ban spoke of a "rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world," which he said had "reached emergency proportions."

U.S. officials said Bush had decided on a $200 million drawdown from the "Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust" to be distributed by the U.S. Agency for International Development "to meet emergency food aid needs abroad."

The money will effectively make up the shortfall in U.S. emergency food aid programs caused by rising prices "and be used to meet unanticipated food aid needs in Africa and elsewhere," according to a statement from the White House.

But $200 million, even added to the $2.1 billion in food aid that USAID distributes each year, is a relatively insignificant amount next to the scale of the problem.

For the poorest and hungriest, the so-called low-income food-deficit countries in Africa, the FAO estimates their bill for importing cereals will rise by 74 percent this year.

This is despite a forecasted increase in grain production -- which the organization admits is dependent on favorable weather conditions.

And the outlook beyond this year is no more reassuring.

"We need �� a significant increase in long-term productivity in food grain production," said Ban, noting that the effects of the crisis were undoing years of progress in reducing poverty.

He also called on the international community to "take urgent and concerted action in order to avert the larger political and security implications of this growing crisis."

But the bottom line, says Katarina Wahlberg, social and economic policy program coordinator for the liberal-leaning Global Policy Forum, is that over the past few decades, as a result of trade liberalization and structural adjustment policies, developing countries have become food importers; and the most fragile states lack the wherewithal to intervene in food markets to help their hungriest citizens.

"Caving to pressure from the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, poor countries dismantled tariffs and other barriers to trade, enabling large agribusiness and subsidized goods from rich countries to undermine local agricultural production," Wahlberg said.

"To some degree, food aid -- in the form of dumped subsidized goods produced in rich countries -- also played a role."

Wahlberg said the most important factor behind the current spike in food prices is the rapidly growing demand for biofuels like ethanol, particularly in Europe and the United States.

"An increasing number of policymakers and analysts strongly oppose converting food into fuel," she said, charging that biofuel production "causes environmental harm and speeds up global warming."

"U.S. ethanol production uses large amounts of fuel, fertilizer, pesticides and water, and most analysts consider its environmental impact quite negative." And in Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil, thousands of acres of rainforest have been cleared to cultivate palm oil or sugarcane for biofuel production.

Although U.S. officials tout alternatives to corn for ethanol production, critics have long chastised it as a thinly disguised price support program for American corn farmers.

To address the longer-term challenges, Wahlberg told United Press International, an international agricultural system is needed that is "more sustainable and smaller scale, more oriented to local needs" with less emphasis on a multinational supply chain dominated by agribusiness and oriented to production for export.

She said climate change remains the most important long-term challenge.

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