Watch this appeal from Zainab Bangura, foreign minister of Sierra Leone, for international support in confronting the global food crisis.

You may have noticed food costing more when you shop lately. That’s because we’re plunging headlong into a world food crisis. Rocketing prices are affecting billions of people and triggering food riots around the world. In Sierra Leone alone the price of a bag of rice has doubled, making it virtually unaffordable for 90 percent of the country’s citizens. Fears of inflation stalk the whole world with starvation a real possibility for many people around the globe.

Avaaz.org has launched a campaign to support Bangura’s call to petition UN, EU and G8 leaders “to address the world food crisis by mobilizing emergency funding to prevent starvation, removing perverse incentives to turn food into biofuels and managing financial speculation, and to tackle the underlying causes by ending harmful trade policies and investing massively in sustainable agricultural productivity in developing nations.”

Click here to add your name to the food crisis petition.