Global food prices may drop slightly in the coming months but will remain volatile, the new head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jose Graziano da Silva, said today.
"We are expecting that prices will not grow and not drop. There will be some reductions but not drastically, volatility will remain," he said during the first press conference of his mandate.
According to the UN food agency head, "low-level stocks are the base for speculation" on food prices.
The Rome-based agency warned in a November report that while global food prices had fallen sharply in October, volatility on commodity markets is still hurting prospects for world food security.
It also forecast that high prices were likely to continue "well into 2012" and said the cost of food purchases for the poorest countries in the world had risen by more than a third over the past year. High food prices are seen as one of the factors behind the famine in southern Somalia and the uprisings in North Africa last year.
