Soaring prices for products like rice and wheat are causing headaches for aid agencies and politicians

　　For years, anti-poverty campaigners railed against low commodity prices, which depressed farmers' incomes in developing countries. In recent months, the world price of virtually all staples has shot up, but the activists are still not cheering. They worry that this boom (intensified by “green” subsidies for biofuel crops) may worsen poverty even more than low agricultural prices did.

　　High food prices do help poor farmers, but they also hurt the more numerous category of people (poor city-dwellers as well as landless rural folk) who must buy food to survive. That “unintended consequence”—in the words of Gawain Kripke of Oxfam International, a British charity—has caused serious problems for the organisations that bring food aid to the poorest. The World Food Programme (WFP), a UN agency, has just issued an urgent appeal for $500m, to cover higher food costs. America's Agency for International Development (USAID), a huge financer of food aid, is asking for $350m.

　　The short-term outlook seems grim, both for the poor and the agencies that supposedly help them. Even before the current price boom started two years ago, food aid was running at historically low levels, perhaps half the real-terms total of two decades earlier. And the WFP says hunger is on the rise in the countries it watches. It classifies as “hotspots” the places—most of central Africa, plus Afghanistan—where more than a third of the people do not get as much food as is needed. A second tier, where between a fifth and a third lack adequate food, includes much of West Africa, the Indian sub-continent and Bolivia.