**World leaders are preparing to meet in Rome for a UN conference aimed at stabilising food prices.**The World Summit on Food Security comes a year after major rises in food prices caused chaos across the globe.
The UN says one billion people are hungry and has said food production must increase to cope with a growing global population.
But critics say the summit may fail to set ambitious goals and note leaders of the richest nations will not be there.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is the only leader from one of the G8 leading industrialised countries to take part. Pope Benedict XVI will also address the delegates.
The BBC’s David Loyn in Rome says the leaders attending the summit will try to keep the world focussed on the consequences of the massive rise in food price last year, which hit the world’s poorest the hardest.
The UN says one in six people in the world is already going hungry while the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has warned that if more land is not used for food production now, 370 million people could be facing famine by 2050.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and FAO head Jacques Diouf both staged symbolic 24-hour fasts in preparation for the summit.