UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called for nations to seize what he described as a historic opportunity to revitalise agriculture as a way of tackling the food crisis.
Mr Ban told a summit in Rome called by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization that food production would have to rise by 50% by 2030 to meet demand.
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He said export restrictions and import tariffs should be minimised to alleviate the crisis.
The FAO has warned industrialised countries that unless they increase yields, eliminate barriers and move food to where it is needed most, a global catastrophe could result.
The summit began this morning with the World Bank and humanitarian agencies demanding action to curb soaring prices that could push up to 100 million people into hunger.
The FAO originally called the summit at the end of last year to discuss the risks posed to food security by climate change, but the focus has changed over recent months.
'World public opinion has been taken by surprise by the explosion of a rapid chain of events affecting food followed by the rapid, dramatic rise in the price of foodstuffs,' Italian President Giorgio Napolitano said in a speech opening the summit.
The cost of major food commodities has doubled over the last couple of years, with rice, corn and wheat at record highs.
Some prices have hit their highest levels in 30 years in real terms, provoking protests and riots in some developing countries where people may spend more than half their income on food.
Some 44 national leaders are at the summit, including the Japanese, French and Spanish prime ministers, the presidents of major farming nations like Brazil and Argentina and the leaders of many African nations including Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.
Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his first trip to the EU as president to attend the summit.
'Iran can play a determining role in order to get out of the current global issue related to high prices and a shortage of food products and agricultural products,' Mr Ahmadinejad said as he left Iran.
Delegates at the three-day summit will discuss issues such as aid, trade and technology to improve farm yields. Hunger campaigners single out biofuels - often made by converting food crops into fuel - as a prime culprit for the crisis.
'Countries are justifying the pursuit of biofuels on the grounds that they offer a means to reduce emissions from transport and improve energy security,' Oxfam said in a report released for the summit.
'But there is mounting scientific evidence that biofuel mandates (policy support) are actually accelerating climate change by driving the expansion of agriculture into critical habitats such as forests and wetlands.'
The US is channelling about a quarter of its maize crop into ethanol production by 2022 and the EU plans to get 10% of motor fuel from bio-energy by 2020. Biofuel supporters say its effect on global food prices is small.
US Agriculture Secretary Ed Shafer said before the summit began that biofuels accounted for only around 3% of the total food price rise. Oxfam said the real impact was about 30%.
World Bank chief Robert Zoellick said the issue should not be allowed to dominate the summit, although biofuels clearly competed with food production. However, he said Africa could benefit from sugar-based biofuel production as Brazil has.
The World Bank estimates higher food prices are pushing 30m Africans into poverty. Mr Zoellick said African leaders wanted action, not words.
'It would be unfortunate if (bio-energy) becomes the sole point of debate, because then we would not meet what poor countries tell me they want, which is resources for safety net programmes, seeds and fertilisers, and export bans lifted,' he said yesterday.
Brazil, a pioneer in sugar-cane based biofuels, is set to defend them at the summit. Its foreign minister, Celso Amorim, said fair trade and the abolition of rich countries' subsidies to farmers were crucial issues for the summit.
