This year's near trebling in the price of rice -- the main staple for most of the world's poor -- has driven the issue home. It has triggered riots in Haiti and raised the risk of starvation for the hundreds of millions who depend on subsidised foods.

With anxiety over food supply running higher than anytime since the 1960s, the former Cambridge scholar is busier than ever, just as passionate and in high demand.

"My wife says I have a one-track mind," he said during an interview squeezed between a meeting with an analyst from Asian brokerage CLSA and a consultation with a pack of regional politicians.

His wife Mina, a women's rights campaigner who met Swaminathan in Cambridge over 50 years ago, enforces quiet time during his daily siesta, part of a regime that helps give him the energy and focus of a man several decades his junior. A slight stoop and white hair are rare signs of his advanced age.

TAKING CUES FROM 1960s

Today's crisis is still far from that of the 1960s, when China was engulfed in deadly famine and India barely got by on hand-to-mouth imports, reviving the grim Malthusian view that the world's population was expanding too quickly to feed itself.

Photograph is for representational purposes only.

Photograph: stock.Xchange