While G7 finance ministers and central bankers deliberated in Rome over how to deploy resources to rescue their crumbling economies and financial systems, UN and other agencies were there to remind them that global poverty was on the rise again.

“The numbers of hungry and poor are increasing,” warned Lennart Bage, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (Ifad), noting that the long downward trend in the ranks of poverty had been reversed, partly due to continuing high prices of food and a fall in remittances.