World food prices will fall from current peaks in the coming years but will remain “substantially above” average levels from the past decade.

The world’s poorest nations are most vulnerable — particularly the urban poor in food-importing countries — and will require increased humanitarian aid to stave off hunger and undernourishment, a joint agricultural outlook by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said.

High oil prices, changing diets, urbanization, expanding populations, flawed trade policies, extreme weather, growth in biofuel production and speculation have sent food prices soaring worldwide, triggering protests from Africa to Asia and raising fears that millions more will suffer malnutrition.

Meanwhile, in the US the core US inflation rate or Producer Price Index (PPI) rose 0.4% in April, double the increase forecast by economists.

This puts the core US inflation rate up 3% in the past year, the biggest year-over-year rise since late 1991.

“Since the beginning of the credit crisis last summer, Fed policy has been purely inflationary,” says Bill Bonner in The Daily Reckoning, “intended to convince people that they had more money and credit than they thought…and that they should spend it and invest it. But that policy can’t work forever. Eventually, consumer prices rise sharply. Then, the game is over…the Fed has to ‘lower inflation expectations’ before it can inflate again. The hocus pocus only has a positive effect, in other words, as long as people are misled…once they catch, the jig is up.”And on a global scale, “rising raw material prices, in particular rising food prices, are now causing real hardship and what represents a cause for shoppers in developed economies to grumble is a matter nothing short of life and death for the millions less fortunate around the world,” says Money Week editor Merryn Somerset Webb.