New Delhi: Nearly 100 million additional people, a significant number of them Indians, are at risk of malnutrition as food prices skyrocket across the world, the United Nations Children Fund (Unicef) has said.

"The price of food is skyrocketing around the world, and it's women and children who are most at risk because of the emerging food crisis," Unicef USA said.

Branding it an "emergency of enormous proportions", officials in the UN body said in an email to IANS that it was a "silent tsunami".

According to the global childcare watchdog, the price of rice has more than doubled in the last year, while wheat has increased over 130 percent.

For every percentage point that the price of staple foods increases, the number of people who become "food-insecure" increases by 16 million, it warned.

"At the current rate, we can project that 1.2 billion people would become chronically hungry by 2025."