Report: Urgent action needed to avert global hunger

The graph above tracks world food prices throughout the year (January to December) for 2010 and previous years.  It is an index, which means that prices are expressed as a percentage of base years, in this case the average of food prices from 2002 to 2004. Thus we can see that only in 2008 and now again in 2010 were food prices above 200 percent of what they were on average in 2002-04.  Food prices have now reached record levels, even higher than they were in 2008, the peak of the last food crisis.  Source