LONDON: The European Union too jumped into the US bandwagon to target India and China for driving food prices worldwide, saying the huge increase in demand in these two countries was like an "elephant".

European Union Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural development Mariann Fischer Boel said change in dietary habits in India and China was responsible for spiraling global food prices. "Those who see biofuels as the driving force behind recent food price increases have overlooked not just one elephant standing right in front of them, but two," she said.

 "The first elephant is the huge increase in demand from emerging countries like China and India. These countries are eating more meat," she said. The top EU official's comments came days after US President George W Bush joined US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in blaming the rising prosperity of India's huge middle class for the spiraling global food prices.

Biofuels were not to blame for the rise in prices, Fischer Boel said in a speech at the European Policy Centre, a Brussels-based think-tank. "It takes about 4 kg of cereals to produce 1 kg of pork, and about 2 kg of cereals to make 1 kg of poultry meat. So a dietary shift towards meat in countries with populations of over 1 billion people each has an enormous impact on commodity markets," she said.

The second elephant, Boel added, was the weather, and its effect on production. In 2006, bad weather hit cereal production in the US, the European Union, Canada, Russia, Ukraine and Australia. In 2007, the same thing happened again, except in the US. "This is not a recipe for low prices," she said. "However, long-term price rises are not an entirely bad thing.

They could be good news for the 70 to 80 per cent of the world's poorest who live in rural areas and depend on farming for their livelihood. Here, we can do much better with our development aid," the EU official said. The European Parliament is due to adopt a resolution on rising food prices at its plenary session on May 22.

Three days ago, Bush specifically took the case of Indian middle class to argue that its demand for better nutrition was a factor in pushing the global food prices up. "There are 350 million people in India who are classified as middle class. That's bigger than America. Their middle class is larger than our entire population. "And when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up," Bush had said.