Welcome to the food rollercoaster - enjoy the ride!

Farmers should respond to market signals - supply and demand. When prices are high farmers produce more, and then prices go down. Easy. That was the view of Agriculture Minister Jim Paice on Countryfile recently. He believes state intervention in the form of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has outlived its usefulness and should be on its way out, except for a bit of funding for some marginal green measures.

Should it?

As the latest World Bank Food Price Watch report released last week shows, agriculture commodity prices bear very little relation at all to simple signals of supply and demand.

Since 2008, economists, NGOs and governments alike have been consistently taken by surprise at the extreme volatility in food prices. There are just too many factors affecting food supplies that our current food system is not equipped to deal with. Things like extreme weather events, lower grain production in exporting countries to save water, demand for biofuels, and too much dependence on food imports - just a few of the examples outlined in the report.

Other research has identified longer-term factors at play - too much demand for grain for meat and biofuels from the rich, farming's dependence on dwindling resources like oil and phosphates, and the destruction of freshwater supplies and soils by industrial agriculture.

Added to this is a lack of investment in smallholder agriculture, and speculation in food commodities.

The findings of the World Bank report are startling. The global food price index increased 15 per cent in the last four months and is only 3 per cent below its 2008 peak. As a result, 44 million more people have been pushed into extreme poverty, and a famine has developed in the Horn of Africa.

A closer look at countries that have escaped the worst impacts of price increases also makes for interesting reading.

India's public purchasing of grain stocks meant it was able to release grain when needed to mitigate price rises. In Cambodia, the production of local crops like cassava has shielded consumers from food inflation. In some African countries, good harvests of domestic crops like maize, sorghum, millet and cassava have substituted imported crops.

Countries that have strong domestic food production and consumption, and are able to assert some control over their food supply, are more able to cope with global price volatility.

Unfortunately, the World Bank's recommendations are simply not comprehensive enough to make a dent in the food price crisis. Increasing sustainable food productivity, finding biofuels that dont use food crops, monitoring food stocks and banning export restrictions, will only tackle some of the symptoms of the food crisis without weeding out all the root causes, leaving us open to recurring crises in the future.

Friends of the Earth has published our own recommendations for tackling the food crisis on an international scale.

These include:

• Investing in agricultural systems that restore natural resources rather than deplete them - such as agro-ecology, recommended by the UN Special Rapporteur;
• Redesigning trade rules to allow countries to take measures necessary to feed their populations;
• Abolishing high biofuel targets;
• Introducing policy measures to curb rich countries' high demand for meat and dairy;
• Raising farmers' incomes and reducing corporate power in the food chain;
• Regulating speculation on food commodities
• Factoring environmental costs into the cost of food production.

Every one of these solutions is echoed in a recent report from the United Nations High Level Panel on Food Price Volatility.

The panel also recommends that policy makers rebuild world food stocks and form food security strategies including direct state interventions to reduce price volatility in domestic markets.

That brings me back to the UK's reform of agricultural policy, which seems firmly stuck in the past.

The UK's current position on reforming the Common Agricultural Policy is mainly committed to raising food production at the lowest possible cost, ignoring most of the issues raised above. Britain retains a naive belief in the power of the global market to take care of our farmers and our food needs. Evidence from recent years, reiterated in the latest UN and World Bank reports, shows this is simply not true.

Instead of sticking its head in the sand, the UK Government must take advantage of the current opportunity to reform the CAP and shift us to truly sustainable farming practices. This includes abolishing factory faming and supporting British farmers to produce animal feed for our farms, instead of relying on imports. It also means ensuring fair prices for UK farmers, incentives to shift farmers to low input agriculture, and better control over imports and exports.

Its time to leave the thrills and spills for the seaside, in food policy a steady track is far more fun.