Global food output may be hurt as climate change brings more extreme weather over the next decade, with China likely set for harsher droughts and North America getting heavier rain, said the World Meteorological Organization.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The United Nations said Wednesday that about 1.3 billion tons of food is lost or wasted every year, which amounts to roughly one third of all the food produced for human consumption.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization commissioned a report on food loss and waste as rising prices and diminished production worldwide have contributed to an increase in food insecurity.

Global warming is already cutting substantially into potential crop yields in some countries — to such an extent that it may be a factor in the food price increases that have caused worldwide stress in recent years, researchers suggest in a new study.
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Wheat yields in recent years were down by more than 10 percent in Russia and by a few percentage points each in India, France and China compared with what they probably would have been without rising temperatures, according to the study.

(Reuters) - The world has to act against hunger, which affects 13 percent of the population, if it wants to strengthen global security, a candidate to run the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said on Tuesday.

Franz Fischler, an Austrian who is former EU agriculture commissioner, said during an interview the whipsaw effect of volatile food prices complicates the effort to expand local production and improve the welfare of subsistence farmers. Prices spiked in mid-2008, plunged in 2009 and hit a record high early this year.

(Reuters) - Up to 200,000 deaths from severe malaria could be averted each year if malarial countries were to switch to a more expensive but more effective drug, the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said Tuesday.

In a report on the mosquito-borne disease, MSF said data from recent trials in Africa had shown that the drug, called artesunate, was more effective and easier to use than quinine, a cheaper malaria medicine often used in poorer countries.