TOKYO (AFP) - The World Bank, the World Food Organisation and other aid groups will hold an emergency meeting next week to discuss ways to deal with the global food crisis, a World Bank official said Friday. Senior officials including World Bank president Robert Zoellick will meet Thursday on the sidelines of an African development conference in Yokohama, southwest of Tokyo, the Bank's Tokyo office chief Kazushige Taniguchi said. Top officials from the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) are also expected to attend, he said. "This will be an opportunity to share awareness of short-term and longer-term challenges the world faces in food supply," he said. "In addition to aid to countries in urgent need of food, we have to look at the longer term goal of boosting food production," he said. "You may think that farmers would naturally increase production if food prices rise, but that logic doesn't work in Africa, which lacks public infrastructure, such as hedging of drastic moves in food prices," he said. The World Bank is co-hosting the African development conference, known as the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), to be held from Wednesday through Friday in Yokohama. Japan wants to make the global food situation one of the major themes of the Group of Eight summit that it will host in July, along with aid for Africa and tackling global warming. Meanwhile, Japan is to release 20,000 tonnes of rice for developing countries in Africa and elsewhere to help ease food shortages, a government official said Friday. Tokyo will use its stockpile of domestic and imported rice for the aid package, part of 100 million dollars' worth of emergency food aid announced in late April, foreign ministry official Shigeru Kondo said. The government decided at a cabinet meeting Friday to release a first tranche of food aid worth about 54 million dollars, he said. "Part of the grant aid will be offered to five countries such as Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and under the scheme those recipient governments will buy Japanese rice of about 20,000 tonnes in total," he said. Other recipients countries include Guinea-Bissau, The Central African Republic and Burundi, he said. The move to send rice to Africa comes ahead of an African Development conference Japan will host next week. Tokyo is also considering a request to send 200,000 tonnes of its stockpiled foreign rice to the Philippines. Food shortages have sparked protests and even riots in some countries and export limits in others, hurting developing countries where food costs consume the lion's share of household income. But Japan, Asia's biggest economy, is sitting on stocks of 1.5 million tonnes of imported rice as it needs to import 770,000 tonnes every year to fulfill its obligations as a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Japan has pledged to put the global food crisis on the agenda when it hosts the annual summit of the Group of Eight rich nations in July. Japan is considering focusing foreign aid efforts on boosting rice production in African countries, officials said.