Consumers will feel the crunch as rice prices soar, a Bradford wholesaler has warned.

Prices of the grain - a staple for billions of people worldwide - have doubled in the last three weeks, sparking fears of hoarding, starvation and riots in developing countries such as India and Thailand.

The situation has been blamed on the quality of crops caused by droughts and an increase in demand because of the rising populations of those developing countries where much of the world's rice is grown, experts say.

And businesses in Britain say the worldwide shortage is having a knock-on effect as those countries ban exports of rice and it becomes more expensive and less available.

Bradford's P&B Foods, which sells about 5,000 tons of rice every year, is now selling it at double the price - at more than £1 a kilo - compared to 55p for the same amount a year ago.

And that price is only "reluctantly" to regular wholesale customers, said Chandra Patel, buying director for the company.

"There will be a crunch for customers," he said.

Mr Patel said wholesalers were finding it more and more difficult to buy rice after export tariffs or bans were brought in for China, India, Egypt, Vietnam and Cambo-dia.

Because of the shortages, British importers were hoarding stocks of the increasingly valuable commodity, he said.

"The biggest problem we are having is procuring the rice," he said. "This has happened because the crops have been down and consumption has gone up because of big population rises in developing countries.

"It has forced the prices to go up and up.

"Rice is the staple diet of people in developing countries, some who are only earning £2 a day.

One kilo of rice is costing £1. They can't afford it and are going hungry.

"Incomes in this country are high enough to sustain these increases and even today's high prices are not as high as in the early '70s, so it is not all doom and gloom.

Peter Bashir, 56, the owner of Zouk Bar in Leeds Road and Kebabeesh in Greengates, said he had been paying £20 for a 20kg bag of rice up until two weeks ago.

Since then he said grain prices had spiked "astronomically" costing £29.99 for the same bag today.

The price was again set to increase to about £35 in the next few weeks, he said.

"We have absorbed the cost so far but it is becoming more and more difficult just trying to hold the line," he said.

"It is getting to the point where we will not be able to because prices are going up so much.

"There is a ban on exporting at the moment, and in the western world we are going through the stock pile of rice we have already got.

"Hopefully they will release more later on but the wholesalers say it is going to go up some more before then."