United Nations ? The head of the U.N. plans to urge world leaders today to help bring down soaring food prices by immediately suspending or eliminating many price controls and other agricultural trade restrictions.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will press nations to ease a wide variety of farming taxes, export bans and import tariffs to help millions of the world’s poor cope with the highest food prices in 30 years, U.N. officials said.

Ban, who also seeks to increase world food production, intends to request that the United States and other nations phase out subsidies for food-based biofuels, including ethanol, that have been used to encourage farmers to grow crops for energy use rather than human consumption.

He plans to make his appeal today in Rome at a summit of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

“What we are looking for is at least an agreement on how to deal with the issue of biofuels and subsidies that is not detrimental to the needs of poor people,” said one U.N. official in New York. Several U.N. officials spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they did not want to upstage Ban’s speech.

In a related move Thursday, World Bank President Robert Zoellick announced an international effort to overcome the global food crisis by providing an extra $1.2 billion in grants and loans.

Ban hopes that donor nations at the Rome meeting will develop a concrete plan to revitalize and redirect the global response to hunger.

World prices for food are expected to fall in the coming years but will remain “substantially above” average levels from the past decade, according to a report issued by the U.N.’s FAO and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Food prices have been skyrocketing worldwide because of high oil prices, changing diets, urbanization, expanding populations, flawed trade policies, extreme weather, growth in biofuels production and speculation. They have sparked riots and protests from Africa to Asia and raised fears that millions more will suffer from malnutrition.