PARIS-The world could see a re­peat of the 2008 price cri­sis that spawned dead­ly ri­ots on three con­ti­nents, the UN's top food se­cu­ri­ty ex­pert warned Thurs­day. David Nabar­ro, the UN spe­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tive on food se­cu­ri­ty and nu­tri­tion, told The As­so­ci­at­ed Press that short­ages of food, wa­ter and pow­er are bound to cre­ate so­cial anx­i­ety and po­lit­i­cal in­sta­bil­i­ty in the fu­ture. "Any­body who thinks that 2008 rep­re­sent­ed some kind of peak is dream­ing," Nabar­ro said on the side­lines of an in­ter­na­tion­al con­fer­ence on food se­cu­ri­ty. At the meet­ing, French Pres­i­dent Nico­las Sarkozy called on the world's 20 rich in­dus­tri­al na­tions and ma­jor emerg­ing mar­kets to con­tain farm price volatil­i­ty sparked by com­mod­i­ty spec­u­la­tors.

Sarkozy said con­trol­ling ex­ces­sive mar­ket spec­u­la­tion through tougher reg­u­la­tion, su­per­vi­sion and trans­paren­cy would go a long way to avoid the price in­sta­bil­i­ty seen over the past years. Nabar­ro said fi­nan­cial spec­u­la­tion had acer­bat­ed prob­lems for farm­ers around the world. "Spec­u­la­tors and peo­ple who are tak­ing po­si­tions on fu­ture food prices in or­der to get some sort of fi­nan­cial gain cer­tain­ly do am­pli­fy the price trends," he said. "That am­pli­fi­ca­tion can be quite ex­treme and quite dam­ag­ing." He said this year's price in­creas­es were main­ly caused by droughts and fires, af­fect­ing wheat sales from Chi­na to Ukraine, and corn in the Unit­ed States.

"There are sev­er­al dif­fer­ent fac­tors that can come to­geth­er. These lead to anx­i­eties in world mar­kets, par­tic­u­lar­ly among traders, which in turn can fu­el ris­es sim­ply be­cause peo­ple take po­si­tions on where prices are go­ing to be in the fu­ture," Nabar­ro said. Sarkozy said the dif­fi­cul­ties went far be­yond the whims of na­ture. He said fi­nan­cial mar­ket spe­cial­ists-in­stead of agri­cul­tur­al trad­ing hous­es-had tak­en over the glob­al farm mar­ket and called for change. (AP)