Senior officials including World Bank president Robert Zoellick will meet Thursday on the sidelines of an African development conference in Yokohama, southwest of Tokyo, the Bank's Tokyo office chief Kazushige Taniguchi said.

Top officials from the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) are also expected to attend, he said.

"This will be an opportunity to share awareness of short-term and longer-term challenges the world faces in food supply," he said.

"In addition to aid to countries in urgent need of food, we have to look at the longer term goal of boosting food production," he said.

"You may think that farmers would naturally increase production if food prices rise, but that logic doesn't work in Africa, which lacks public infrastructure, such as hedging of drastic moves in food prices," he said.

The World Bank is co-hosting the African development conference, known as the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), to be held from Wednesday through Friday in Yokohama.

Japan wants to make the global food situation one of the major themes of the Group of Eight summit that it will host in July, along with aid for Africa and tackling global warming.

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