As government ministers, international organisations and representatives of the food industry meet in London today to discuss the world food crisis and the UK government announces a new aid package to address food price rises, ActionAid’s Dr Claire Melamed asks who loses and who gains.

She said: “Part of the answer to the food crisis lies in the world economy. Trade and aid policies imposed by rich countries have conspired to make developing countries more dependent on international markets.

“The developing world has been encouraged to open its markets to food imports to meet consumer needs while farmers have been all but abandoned by aid donors. Many countries have consequently become net food importers. This has proved to be disastrous.

“It's the poor, both in the countryside and the cities, who suffer the most with over 850 million people going hungry on a daily basis.

“Meanwhile as trade is increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, we see multinational agri-business such as Cargill and Nestle making gargantuan profits out of a situation that means misery for pretty much everyone else.”

Poor countries now spend twice as much of their foreign exchange on food imports as they did in 2000 whilst aid for agriculture is less than half what it was in 1984.

ActionAid is calling for more aid to boost agricultural sectors and for poor countries to be enabled once more to increase their agricultural productivity through trade rules that help their farmers.