WASHINGTON, May 1 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President George W. Bush on Thursday requested 770 million U.S. dollars from Congress to help ease the current food crisis that fuels hunger and violence across the world.
Addressing a news conference at the White House, Bush said he included the request in a broader Iraq war funding bill of 70 billion dollars for 2009 and sent it to the Capitol Hill earlier Thursday.
"In some of the world's poorest nations, rising prices can mean the difference between getting a daily meal and going without food," Bush said.
He added the United States would spend a total of 5 billion dollars this year and next on food aid and related programs.
The U.S. government has released 240 million dollars in emergency food aid earlier this month to help ease the global food crisis, including 40 million dollars provided to the World Food Program (WFP).
Growing populations, greater demand for food and more consumption of crops in biofuels have led to soaring food prices worldwide.
The prices of staple foods including grain, oil and sugar are all at least 50 percent higher year on year.
The food crisis partly resulted from the Bush administration-backed policies that encourage making food-based biofuels as alternative energy sources.
Official statistics show that about 20 percent of U.S. corn was used to produce alternative fuel and the proportion is expected to reach 25 percent this year.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice admitted Tuesday when attending a gathering of the Peace Corps in Washington D.C. that the decision to set aside American farmland for the production of corn for biofuels may in part be driving up world food prices.
"There has been apparently some effect, unintended consequence from the alternative fuels effort," she said.
Jeffrey Sachs, an economist from the Columbia University in New York City, also said that the "corn-to-ethanol subsidy which our government is doing really makes little sense."
"We've been putting our food into the gas tank," he added.
