ITALY/UN WORLD FOOD SUMMIT: The United Nations' World Food Summit in Rome ended yesterday as it begun on Monday, with delegates bitterly divided about how best to deal with global hunger. Hunger afflicts 800 million people and causes the death of one person every four seconds.
The summit, hosted by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), was a follow-up to a similar summit five years ago which pledged to halve the number of the world's hungry by 2015.
Although progress towards realising that target has thus far been disappointing, delegates from 182 countries adopted a non-binding resolution on Monday renewing their commitment to achieving that target.
Even as the FAO Director-General, Mr Jacques Diouf, was winding up the summit yesterday with a call "to win the war against hunger and poverty, against scepticism and egoism", many delegates and environmentalists expressed frustration at the summit's lack of concrete achievement.
Officials from developing world countries voiced their outrage that the summit was largely ignored by the affluent West. Apart from host country Italy, represented by the Prime Minister Mr Silvio Berlusconi, and Spain, represented by its Prime Minister Mr José Maria Aznar, no other Western power sent a high-level delegation to Rome this week.
It prompted President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa to comment: "The entire leadership of Western Europe and North America was here in Rome two weeks ago to discuss NATO.
"They all came without exception but they didn't come now. I suppose that's because they don't think the problem of 800 million people going hungry is important".
Against the backdrop of looming famine in six southern African states, FAO has called for an additional $24 billion in agricultural development aid, a call that met with a lukewarm response from both the US and the EU.
Many of the addresses from developing-world leaders were critical of the protectionist agricultural policies implemented by the world's leading powers, a criticism summed up by President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda: "The main causes of food shortages in the world are really three: wars, protectionism in agricultural products in Europe, the US, China, India and Japan, and protectionism in value-added products on the part of the same countries."
The issue of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) also attracted much critical comment. An Indian farming activist, Vandana Shiva, calling the summit "a waste of time and public money" since it was little more than a promotional exercise for those major US biotech companies which argue that GMOs could prove crucial in winning the battle against world hunger.
The "dual tragedy" of AIDS and hunger was highlighted by Ms Marika Fahlen of UNAIDS, the joint UN programme on HIV/AIDS.
In two decades, AIDS has killed seven million agricultural workers in Africa, she said, adding that every day 14,000 people are newly infected with the HIV virus. AIDS flourishes where food is scarce, she said, a point partly acknowledged by the summit's final declaration.
Addressing the summit on behalf of Ireland, Mr John Malone, secretary-general of the Department of Agriculture, pointed out on Wednesday that Ireland Aid has allocated €456 million in development aid for this year, realising an interim target of 0.45 per cent of GNP.
FAO has called on affluent Western countries to devote 0.7 per cent of GNP to development aid, a target largely ignored by most countries but which should be achieved by Ireland by 2007.