FAO’s Food Price Index – which measures monthly changes in international prices of a basket of meat, dairy, cereals, oils and fats, and sugar – dropped nearly four points to 201.8 last month, down 5.1 per cent from August of last year.

The FAO Cereal Price Index averaged 210.9 points, down 16.4 points from July and 49.4 points from August 2012.

The drop in grain prices “reflects expectations for strong growth in world cereal production this year and, especially, a sharp recovery in maize,” the FAO said in reference to corn.

Global production of maize is forecast to rise to 983 million tonnes. The bulk of that figure originating in the United States where maize production is expected to reach 343 million tonnes this year, some 25 per cent higher than the 2012 drought-reduced level.

Higher maize crops are officially reported in Argentina and improved prospects in the European Union and Ukraine.

Meanwhile, coarse grain output is predicted to expand 10.5 per cent to 1,285 million tonnes, while the wheat to a 7.6 per cent rise to 710 million tonnes.

World rice production is set to increase by 1.3 per cent, reaching a new high of 497 million tonnes, in milled equivalent.

The boosts have led to a revised forecast of overall world cereal production upwards 14 million tonnes to 2,492 million tonnes, according to a separate FAO report. This would be 179 million tonnes higher than in 2012 and a new record.

The Rome-based agency said that based on the latest forecasts, total use of cereals for direct human consumption is set to expand by 1.2 per cent to 1, 094 million tones.

The FAO Oils/Fats Price Index averaged 185.5 points in August, 5.7 points below the July value and the third consecutive monthly decline.

Dairy prices, FAO noted, averaged 239.1 points in August, 2.8 points more than in July and 37 per cent above its level in August last year. Prices rose last month for all dairy products in the Index except butter due to export supply limits in major trading countries.

The FAO Meat Price Index averaged 175.0 points in August, an increase of 2.2 points.

“Although relatively resilient to economic downturns, the agricultural markets continue to reflect the impact of a two speed global economy with weak recovery in developed countries and vibrant growth in many developing countries,” the authors reported in the ‘Agricultural Outlook, 2013-2022’ produced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

This year’s report contains a special feature on the future of agriculture in China, whose agricultural output rose 4.5 times since 1980. With one-fifth of the world’s population, comparably little agricultural land and water resources, China’s focus on food security and self- sufficiency have allowed it to improve access to food.

In Beijing, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría and FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva participated in the report’s launch. The event was hosted by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and is part of a two-day international forum.

“High food prices are an incentive to increase production and we need to do our best to ensure that poor farmers benefit from them,” said Mr. Graziano da Silva. “Let’s not forget that 70 per cent of the world’s food insecure population lives in rural areas of developing countries and that many of them are small-scale and subsistence farmers themselves.”

He added: “China’s agricultural production has been tremendously successful. Since 1978, the volume of agricultural production has grown almost five fold and the country has made significant progress towards food security. China is on track to achieving the first millennium development goal of hunger reduction.”

According to the report, global agricultural production for crop sectors and livestock production reviewed is projected to grow on average 1.5 per cent annually, compared to 2.1 per cent in the previous decade.

“These trends reflect rising costs, growing resource constraints, and increasing environmental pressures, which are anticipated to inhibit supply response in virtually all regions,” OECD and FAO said.

Mr. Gurría said that the “relatively bright” picture – strong demand, expanding trade and high prices – assumes continuing economic recovery. “If we fail to turn the global economy around, investment and growth in agriculture will suffer and food security may be compromised,” he said.

“Governments need to create the right enabling environment for growth and trade,” he added. “Agricultural reforms have played a key role in China’s remarkable progress in expanding production and improving domestic food security.”

Policy reforms and economic growth across the globe have been changing demand and supply fundamentals sufficiently to turn agriculture into a more market-driven sector which provides investment opportunities, particularly in developing countries.

The report forecasts that developing countries will boost their production growth, particularly economies that have invested in the agricultural sector, and therefore boost their trade growth, particularly exports in coarse grains, rice, oils, sugar, beef, poultry and fish.

Consumption of these goods is also projected to increase, particularly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, followed by Latin America and other parts of Asia. Growing populations have been driving the increase in consumption, but also higher incomes, urbanization and changing diets.

Meanwhile, average prices are expected to be higher for the coming decade than they have been in the previous ten years which included historic highs.

The launch of the report comes one day after World Environment Day, which this year focused on curbing the massive loss and waste inherent in today’s food systems. At least one third of all food produced fails to make it from farm to table, according to FAO which is part of the “Think. Eat. Save: Reduce Your Foodprint” campaign with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and public and private sector partners.

If it continues on the current trajectory, the world will need about 60 per cent more food calories in 2050 compared to 2006.

Releasing its latest monthly Food Price Index (FPI), the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said the dairy component of the index, which carries a 17 per cent weight in the overall calculations, jumped by 22 points to 225, one of the largest recorded changes, due to hot, dry weather in Oceania that has cut into the production of milk and its various by-products.

The dairy prices used in FPI are based on the exports of New Zealand, the world’s largest dairy exporter, accounting for about one third of global trade. Export prices for dairy products have also risen for other important exporters, such as the European Union and the United States, but not to the same degree.

“The exceptional increase is in part a reflection of market uncertainty as buyers seek alternative sources of supply,” FPI reported. “In addition, dairy output in Europe has yet to come fully online after a particularly cold winter, which has delayed pasture growth to feed dairy animals.”

On cereals, FAO’s latest Cereal Supply and Demand Brief, reported an overall positive outlook with wheat crops already well advanced and plantings for rice and coarse grains expected to increase in the coming months owing to attractive prices.

“World cereal production in 2013 could recover strongly barring unfavourable weather in major producing regions,” it said, maintaining its March outlook that global wheat production this year is expected to increase by 4 per cent to 690 million tonnes, the second highest ever after the 700 million tonnes produced in 2011.

The FAO slightly revised the 2012 crop production estimate upward by nearly 3 million tonnes, which now stands 2 per cent lower than the record set in 2011.

“The World in 2013: ICT Facts and Figures,” produced by the ITU, also shows that despite a positive general trend where 96 per cent of the world has access to mobile phones, in the developing world, 90 per cent of the 1.1 billion households are still not able to surf the Internet.

“We have made the most extraordinary progress in the first 12 years of the new millennium, and yet we still have far to go,” the ITU Secretary-General, Hamadoun I. Touré, told government ministers gathered at the ongoing Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona.

“Mobile broadband is clearly going to be a vital part of the solution, and we must continue to ‘mobilize’ to ensure that all the world’s people have affordable, equitable access to the Internet,” Touré said.

According to the report, household Internet access has grown fastest in Africa over the past four years, at an annual growth rate of 27 per cent.

If trends continue, ITU estimates that 2.7 billion people, or 39 per cent of the world’s population, will be using the Internet by the end of this year. However, the greater figures will be in the industrialized countries.

The falling cost of fixed-broadband services – 82 per cent lower over the past five years – allowed more households to install it at home. Europe has the least expensive broadband as measured by the gross national income (GNI) per capita, but connections remain expensive in developing countries and can rise above 50 per cent of GNI per capita, the report warns.

In addition to prices, the speed of broadband Internet widely ranges from star performers in the Republic of Korea, Japan and Bulgaria, among others, to countries in other parts of the world where fewer than 10 per cent of subscribers offer speeds of at least 2 Mbit/s. That is enough to download a three minute song in about 20 seconds.

In terms of men and women, the report broke down for the first time use by gender. Worldwide, 37 per cent of all women use the Internet, compared with 41 per cent of all men. The gender gap is more pronounced in the developing world – with 16 per cent fewer women than men online.

Earlier this week, the ITU released a report which showed that broadband connectivity has the potential to transform education by giving teachers and students greater access to learning resources and technologies.

Measuring the Information Society 2012, produced by the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU), says that developing countries now account for the “lion’s share” of market growth in the mobile sector, according to an ITU press release detailing the report.

The report also shows that the ICT sector has not only become a major contributor to economic growth, but is especially so in developing countries, where global exports of ICT goods accounted for 20 per cent of their merchandise trade in 2010, compared to 12 per cent world wide.

“While prices in developed economies have stabilized, those in developing countries continue to fall at double-digit rates,” ITU stated in a news release on the report.

But, ITU said, the digital divide – generally defined as the difference in levels of ICT access between developed and developing countries – remains significant.

Developed countries register average “connectivity” values that are twice that of their developing counterparts on the Geneva-based agency’s ICT Development Index (IDI), according to the ITU report, which adds that policy makers should pay “keen attention” to the plight of a group of so-called ‘Least Connected Countries’ that the index identifies as having the lowest connectivity rates.

“The past year has seen continued and almost universal growth in ICT uptake,” said Brahima Sanou, the Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau, which authors the annual report. “The surge in numbers of mobile-broadband subscriptions in developing countries has brought the Internet to a multitude of new users.”

She added, “Despite the downward trend, prices remain relatively high in many low-income countries. For mobile broadband to replicate the mobile-cellular miracle and bring more people from developing countries online, 3G network coverage has to be extended and prices have to go down even further.”

Commenting on the report, ITU’s Secretary-General, Hamadoun I. Touré, called it the “annual industry benchmark for technology development.” He said the agency’s reputation as a “wholly impartial and reliable source” renders it the “most comprehensive statistical and analytical report on the shape of ICT markets worldwide.”

The report shows that the Republic of Korea remained the world’s most advanced ICT economy as determined by the IDI, which ranks 155 countries according to their levels of ICT access, use and skills, and takes account of 2011 and 2010 scores.

The next four countries – Sweden, Denmark, Iceland and Finland – were also unchanged from the year before, while the United Kingdom, which moved from 14th place in 2011 to ninth in 2012, was the only new arrival in the top ten.

European countries also filled eight of the top ten spots, with Japan, ranking eighth, as the only non-European country at that level besides top-placed Republic of Korea. All the top 30 were high-income countries, which, ITU said, underlined the “strong link between income and ICT progress.”

ITU noted the report’s findings also include that countries marking the most progress in terms of ICT development were mostly in the developing world. It cites “strong performers” as including Bahrain, Brazil, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and Saudi Arabia.

“Mobile-cellular subscriptions registered continuous double-digit growth in developing country markets, for a global total of six billion mobile subscriptions by end 2011,” ITU said, noting that China and India each account for around one billion subscriptions.

“Mobile broadband continues to be the ICT service displaying the sharpest growth rates,” ITU added. “Over the past year, growth in mobile-broadband services continued at 40 per cent globally and 78 per cent in developing countries. There are now twice as many mobile-broadband subscriptions as fixed-broadband subscriptions worldwide.”

The increase in developing world connectivity rates has taken place alongside a rise in the affordability of telecommunication and Internet services.

“The price of ICT services dropped by 30 per cent globally between 2008 and 2011, with the biggest decrease in fixed-broadband Internet services, where average prices have come down by 75 per cent,” ITU said.

Still, ITU highlighted that fixed-broadband services remained “too expensive” in most developing countries, explaining that the price of a basic, monthly fixed-broadband package represented more than 40 per cent of monthly gross national income per capita at the end of 2011, compared to 1.7 per cent in developed economies.

The Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Food Price Index fell four points in June, bringing it to its lowest level since September 2010, with the largest fall registered in the prices for oils and fats, FAO said in a news release.

The index measures the monthly change in international prices of a basket of 55 food commodities, including meat, dairy, sugar, and cereals.

FAO reported that in spite of the fall, growing concerns over dry weather sent prices for some crops higher toward the end of the month, which may signal a rebound of the Index in July.

The agency lowered its forecast for 2012 world cereal production by more than 23 million tonnes from May, which it said is likely to result in a smaller build-up of global stocks by the end of seasons in 2013.

FAO’s new forecast for world cereal production this year stands at 2,396 million tonnes, still a record level and two per cent up from the last year’s amount.

Even though the overall cereal supply remains adequate due to abundant quantities of rice, FAO noted that grain prices remain very volatile due to “continuing dryness and above-average temperatures in most of the major maize growing regions of the United States.”

The agency will also hold an event tomorrow, at its headquarters in Rome, to discuss volatility in food prices and price speculation.

“FAO has been actively involved in studying food price volatility and identifying appropriate policy responses,” said FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva. “Our analytical work is helping to deepen the understanding of the nature, causes and impacts of volatility and of what governments and other stakeholders can do about it.”

The new legislation revises the current regulation, which will expire on 30 June 2012, by introducing pro-competitive structural measures and extending its validity until 30 June 2022.

The structural measures introduced by this regulation aim to tackle the lack of competition and consumer choice, which leads to high roaming prices. From 1 July 2014, customers will be allowed to sign up for an alternative mobile roaming offer, separate from their contract for national mobile services, whilst using the same phone number. The regulation sets out the conditions for wholesale access to public mobile communications networks to provide roaming services. In addition, in order to allow alternative operators to enter the roaming market, the regulation allows for a reasonable margin between the tariff ceilings for wholesale and retail prices. The regulation also lays down rules aimed at increasing price transparency and improving the provision of information on charges to roaming customers.The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications will be involved in the technical implementation of the regulation. The Commission will review the functioning of this regulation and will report to the European Parliament and the Council no later than 30 June 2016.

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The session, known as UNCTAD XIII, is the first ministerial conference on trade and development since the fallout from the 2007-2008 global economic crisis. The sessions are held every four years, and the theme of this year’s session is ‘Development-centred globalization: Towards inclusive and sustainable growth and development.’

According to the report, mounting financial speculation in commodities and the increasing diversion of agricultural land to biofuel crops has changed the forces underpinning commodity prices, pushing them through a sustained period of increase.

What should be a benefit for poor nations, especially the globe’s 48 least developed countries – whose economies often depend heavily on commodity exports – is on balance a negative development because many of these countries are net importers of oil and staple foods.

Since the food crisis of 2008, prices for basic nourishment have been both volatile and high, the report notes – and poor families are acutely vulnerable, as they typically spend 50 per cent or more of their incomes on food.

The report’s recommendations include that steps be taken to invest in national and regional food reserves to help food-insecure countries; the recent shift to ‘finance-driven globalization,’ as it applies to commodities, should be reconsidered; fiscal and taxation policies should be adjusted so that they help developing countries reap stable, long-term economic benefits from commodities exports; and measures should be taken nationally and internationally to improve the situations of small farmers and other small commodity producers in poor countries.

UNCTAD XIII was officially opened over the weekend. Addressing the opening ceremony on Saturday, the Deputy Secretary-General, Rose Asha-Migiro, said it was appropriate that the conference was taking place in the Arab world, “where rapid political transformations are creating new job opportunities for development.”

“The recent unrest in the Arab world has shown that a lack of economic opportunity and political voice, particularly among youth, is not sustainable,” she said. “Indeed, growing awareness of social injustice and inequality has also led to protests in several advanced countries.”

The Deputy Secretary-General noted that UNCTAD XIII provided an opportunity to address five principal challenges: identifying measures needed to restore growth in the global economy; examining the causes of the crisis, especially those of a systemic nature, and identify measures to prevent its recurrence; identifying trade and developments policies that support efforts to mitigate climate change; making globalization more inclusive; and, lastly, unlocking the full potential of international business.

“UNCTAD’s universal membership, combined with its broad mandate covering trade, finance, investment, technology and sustainable development, make UNCTAD XIII a timely forum to chart the way forward,” Ms. Migiro said. “A failure at this juncture could lead to a loss of trust, and undermine the legitimacy of globalization and its development promise.  Much is at stake.”

Addressing UNCTAD XIII on Sunday, the President of the General Assembly, Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, said UNCTAD had, throughout its existence, closely reflected the concerns of the majority of the Assembly’s membership in the area of development – with that majority of nations also representing the vast majority of the world’s population, and with most of those hailing from developing countries.

“I am here today to reaffirm and renew our shared commitment to the special role that UNCTAD has played – and must continue to play – in giving voice and support to the most urgent needs of the developing nations,” the Assembly President said. “The interests of the most developed countries are also addressed when we recall the importance of South-South and triangular cooperation in the area of development.”