Soweto

ROME (AP) — Soaring world rice prices may begin to drop amid excellent shaping prospects this year, but overall commons prices that have make ready off protests encircling the world are likely to remain high, a U.N. food energy said Thursday.

Global rice buy conditions could ease as new crops are harvested around the world, said the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization. However, price pressure will remain high at least until October or November, when the bulk of this year’s paddy crops will reach the market.

"One thing is to say prices will catch down, which is already happening for uncountable products," Abdolreza Abbassian, an FAO economist, said during the presentation of the agency’s Food Outlook report. "Another is to say they will be low. No, they won’t be low."

Escalating food prices deceive triggered protests around the world in recent months. The United Nations has blamed a range of factors - expensive oil prices, growing demand, bad trade policies, bad weather, dismay buying and speculation.

Rice prices skyrocketed by about 76% from December to April, experts say.

The FAO said the price pressure would ease further if producing countries, such as India, would relax export restrictions on rice.

In Japan, a government official announced Thursday that his nation would release some of its huge stockpile of rice to help ease the crisis, sending some 20,000 tons to five African nations in coming weeks.

That step is part of a $50 million emergency food funding plan to be endorsed by Japan’s Cabinet on Friday, said Shigeru Kondo, a Foreign Ministry aid sanctioned.

The total backing encase - which includes grains, beans and other foods in addition to rice - pleasure be distributed in 12 countries, including Afghanistan, by international bas-relief agencies such as the World Food Program.

Still, the FAO said, food prices were unlikely to fall break weighing down on to pre-2007 levels, in defiance of good production prospects.

"Stock levels are low and you need several good seasons to replenish them," said Hafez Ghanem, FAO assistant director-general. "There will be some improvement but we don’t expect a critical change."

In its arrive, the agency said this year’s cereal production is forecast to increase by 3.8% compared with last year, assuming favorable weather. Tight wheat supply is likely to improve the most, it said.

Recently, FAO said rice production is expected to hit a new record of 666 million tons worldwide, a global increase of 2.3%.

Production in Asia is forecast to incline to 605 million tons from 600 million tons, with particularly large increases in Bangladesh, China, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, the FAO has said.

African production is forecast to grow nearly 4% to 23.2 million tons and in Latin America by 7.4% to 26 million tons, while production is expected to be down in Australia, the United States and Europe. 

Other technologies such as the Android mobile application platform also will be discussed.

The conference is to be held in San Francisco from May 28 to 29. Originally expecting 2,000 attendees, Google already had 2,500 people signed up nearby Thursday evening, said Tom Stocky, Google director of product management.

App Engine will be the submissive to of some announcements that the company is keeping under wraps until next week. "App Engine is Google's liquid to save building and hosting Web apps on our infrastructure, and it makes building Web apps easier to scale and easier to get started," said Pete Koomen, product manager for App Engine at Google.

"Here, we've been edifice Web apps for a while, and we've got a lot of sophistication in this area," Koomen said.

With OpenSocial, the company will discuss adaptation 0.8 of the OpenSocial API specification, an industry-backed initiative to enable applications to access data on social network sites. The almost as good as is to allow developers to build applications that can access a social network's friends and update feeds. There is an agreed-upon specification for version 0.8, but standards for it remains in increment.

OpenSocial is infrastructure for the Web, said Kevin Marks, Google developer advocate. Featured in version 0.8 are REST-ful APIs and the ability to access data on a social-networking site when the application is not running in the browser; offline capabilities are enabled.

"We're covering all the different aspects of OpenSocial development from building applications to [making] a social network site into a container for applications, and then there's discussions about how to get your applications you developed to spread within social networks and technologies and tips for that," said Marks.

"What OpenSocial does is it provides a common API in the interest developing venereal applications," similar to how J2EE provided an API in support of Java development, said Bob Bickel, CEO at OpenSocial supporter Ringside Networks. Ringside enables Facebook and OpenSocial applications to run on any Web placement, serving as a social application server.

For version 0.9 of OpenSocial, a templating language may be added to make it easier to generate HTML without having to write JavaScript code for that purpose, Marks said.

Although backed by companies such as MySpace and Yahoo, social-networking site Facebook is absent from the list of OpenSocial supporters. "Facebook is very welcome to implement OpenSocial, and we're asking and encouraging them to do that," Marks said. A Facebook representative said the company will watch the evolution of OpenSocial and evaluate whether to participate in the future. Facebook has had its own application development program.

OpenSocial is governed not later than the OpenSocial Foundation, featuring Google and other supporters.

Additional topics to be covered at the symposium include AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technologies, such as Google's AJAX APIs and geographic systems.