From subsistence farmers eating rice in Ecuador to gourmets feasting on escargot in France, consumers worldwide face rising food prices in what analysts call a perfect storm of conditions.

Freak weather is a factor. But so are dramatic changes in the global economy, including higher oil prices, lower food reserves, loss of farming land to industrialisation, and growing consumer demand in China and India.

The world's poorest nations still harbour the greatest hunger risk, with deadly food riots breaking out in Egypt and Cameroon.

But food protests now crop up even in Italy.

The price of spaghetti has doubled in impoverished Haiti but well-off Japan is not spared either, with the cost of miso now packing a punch.

'It's not likely that prices will go back to as low as we're used to,' said Mr Abdolreza Abbassian, economist and secretary of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO) Intergovernmental Group for Grains.

'Currently if you're in Haiti, unless the government is subsidising consumers, consumers have no choice but to cut consumption. It's a very brutal scenario, but that's what it is.'

No one knows that better than Haitian Eugene Thermilon, 30, a day labourer who can no longer afford pasta to feed his wife and four children now that its price has nearly doubled to the local equivalent of US$0.57 (S$0.80) a bag. Their only meal on a recent day was two cans of corn grits.

Their hunger has had a ripple effect. Haitian food vendor Fabiola Duran Estime, 31, has lost so many customers that she had to pull her daughter out of kindergarten because she cannot afford the monthly tuition.

In the long term, prices are expected to stabilise.

Farmers will grow more grain for both fuel and food and eventually bring prices down.

Already this is happening with wheat, with more crops to be planted in the US, Canada and Europe in the coming year.

However, consumers still face at least 10 years of more expensive food, according to preliminary FAO projections.

Meanwhile, rising demand for meat and dairy in rapidly developing countries such as China and India is sending up the cost of grain, used for cattle feed.

In China, the food price hikes are both a burden and a boon.

With the rise of the Chinese middle class, per capita meat consumption has risen by 150 per cent since 1980, encouraging people like Mr Zhou Jian to switch from selling auto parts to pork.

The price of pork has jumped 58 per cent in the past year, yet every morning, housewives still crowd his Shanghai shop.

At the same time, rising costs of food staples in China are driving up inflation, forcing Beijing to sell grain from its reserves to hold down prices.

Record oil prices are also forcing food prices up, driving up the cost of everything from fertilisers to transport to food processing.

The oil price spike has also turned up the pressure for countries to switch to biofuels, which the FAO says will drive up the cost of corn, sugar and soybeans 'for many more years to come'.

In Japan, the ethanol boom is hitting the prices of mayonnaise and miso, two important culinary ingredients.

A 1kg bottle of mayonnaise his risen by about 10 per cent in two months to as much as 330 yen (S$4.60) said Mr Daishi Inoue, a cook at a Chinese restaurant.

For countries like Burkina Faso in Western Africa, the situation is dire. Ms Irene Belem, a 25-year-old with twins, struggles to buy milk, which has gone up by 57 per cent in recent weeks.

'We knew we were poor before, but now it's worse than poverty,' she said.

In Egypt, where the price of bread is up 35 per cent and cooking oil 26 per cent, at least seven people have died in fights in queues for subsidised bread.

In the Philippines, amid fears of a looming rice shortage, President Gloria Arroyo yesterday said the government would clamp down on rice hoarders who artificially jack up the commodity's price.

She has tasked Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap with staking out all government warehouses that stock the subsidised rice varieties 'so he can follow the big 10-wheeler trucks and see where they are bringing rice'.

She warned: 'He is investigating all warehouses, watching them, relicensing them. He shall hit the hoarders.'

ASSOCIATED PRESS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE