"The current dramatic world food situation reminds us of the fragility of the balance between global food supplies and the needs of the world's inhabitants, and of the fact that earlier commitments to accelerate progress towards the eradication of hunger have not been met," FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said ahead of the summit.

The high-level meeting, to be attended by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and some 40 heads of state or government, was the first global response to the recent cycle of food prices hike, aimed at winning donor pledges for urgent aid as short-term solutions and also to generate longer term strategies to safeguard food production.

"We hope that world leaders coming to Rome will agree on the urgent measures that are required to boost agricultural production, especially in the most affected countries, and at the same time protect the poor from being adversely affected by high food prices," Diouf said.

In an address to the Rome-based UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) on Monday, Ban warned the world had come to an "alarming juncture", blaming food prices hike on lack of incentives to invest in agriculture.

"For years, falling food prices and rising production lulled the world into complacency," Ban said, "You know better than anyone how we arrived at this alarming juncture."

"Governments put off hard decisions and overlooked the need to invest in agriculture," he added, warning the food issue could trigger a cascade of other crises, affecting economic growth, social progress, and even political security around the world.

Ban was expected to call on developed countries to open markets for agriculture products from developing countries and eliminate subsidies to farmers, a thorny issue hindering the Doha Round global trade talks.

Developing countries have long complained about heavily subsidized food from Europe and the United States being dumped on their markets, damaging their own farmers.

In an interview with Financial Times, Diouf urged rich countries to increase their aid to agriculture tenfold to 30 billion US dollars a year to help resolve the global food crisis.