The International Research Institute (IRRI) called for sustained global reinvestment in agriculture to cut soaring food prices that it said have made seventy five million more people hungry.

After the end of a three day meeting at the institute, the head of the IRRI board had said that “growth in agricultural productivity is the only way to ensure that people have access to enough affordable food. Achieving this is along term effect.

A year or two of extra funding for agricultural research is not enough. To ensure that improved technologies flow from the research and development pipeline, a sustained reinvestment in agriculture is crucial.”

The meeting followed a spike in the price of rice, a staple food of some poor parts of the world, to more than 1,000 dollars a ton in May amid surging demand, falling productivity growth and natural calamities that devastated key rice growing areas.

Although rice prices have settled to around 700 hundred dollars a ton, this still double the price of one year ago, the board noted.

It said that the world needs a second Green Revolution to replicate the achievement of scientific breakthroughs of between 1967 to 1990 that brought hundreds of millions of Asians out of poverty.