Rome: Faced with an immediate hunger crisis and the need to double food production in the next 30 years, world leaders meeting on Tuesday to discuss soaring food prices were mostly in agreement on how the problem could be resolved. The questions were how to get there and who was going to pay for it. The steps needed? Immediately deliver more food aid to the world's hungry. Provide small farmers with seeds and fertilizer. Scrap export bans and restrictions. And vastly increase agriculture research and outreach programs to improve crop production. The cost? Jacques Diouf, director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN and the host of the meeting, estimated it could run to $30 billion a year. "The problem of food insecurity is a political one,' he said. "It is a question of priorities in the face of the most fundamental of human needs. And it is those choices made by governments that determine the allocation of resources.' As expected, biofuels emerged as the most contentious issue of the conference, and several speakers criticized government policies that diverted food crops to energy use, particularly at a time of increasing hunger. Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak called for "an urgent international dialogue' on the food crisis that "sets standards for the responsible utilization of agricultural crops as food for human beings, not as fuel for human beings.' Brazil's president, Luiz In