Bumper harvests coming but food to stay costly - U.N.

By Robin Pomeroy

ROME (Reuters) - The world will see bumper harvests this year but that might not be enough to protect the world's poorest countries from food bills four times higher than at the start of the decade, the United Nations forecast on Thursday.

Increased plantings and good weather will provide a global wheat crop 8.7 percent greater than last year, one of the reasons wheat prices have slid some 50 percent since February, the Food and Agriculture Organisation said.

"This improvement in supply should, in principle, help ... but we don't expect to see prices going down to what they were before," assistant director-general Hafez Ghanem told a news conference to present the FAO's six-monthly Food Outlook report.

The world has seen a huge spike in food prices in the last year, blamed on a "perfect storm" of factors including increased demand from rapidly developing countries India and China, growth in biofuels production and the oil price's effect on costs.

While supermarket prices have risen in richer nations, the effect is much harsher in developing countries where people spend 50-80 percent of their income on food. Consumers have protested and in some cases rioted against price rises.

Rice, a staple for more than half the earth's population, will remain in short supply on global markets and poor countries that rely on food imports could see food bills up 40 percent this year after a similar price hike in 2007, the report said.

"The sustained rise in imported food expenditures (for poor countries) ... constitutes a very worrying development," it said. "Their annual food import basket could cost four times as much as it did in 2000."