The world is in a "race against the clock" in the war against hunger, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation chief Mr Jacques Diouf said today at the end of the World Food Summit.
The summit formally came to a close with a reaffirmation of the political will of member states to end hunger, but without a decision on how to achieve it.
Mr Diouf said the countries of the world had begun a "race against the clock to put our commitments into action, to demonstrate that together we will win the war against hunger and poverty, against scepticism and egotism."
He urged member states to work "in the interests of all, rich and poor, to bring into being a more equitable world.
"The right of food comes before anything else," Mr Diouf said.
Host Prime Minister Mr Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, in his closing remarks, identified global hunger, along with terrorism, as "the biggest problem facing the world."
He said the summit conclusions would form part of the work of this month's Group of Eight richest nations summit in Canada, and at EU summit in Seville in July.
The four-day summit faced a chorus of calls from poor states for improved access to wealthy nations' markets and a reduction of the debt burden.
The summit's final declaration had reaffirmed a commitment made at the first World Food Summit in 1996 to cut by half the number of global hungry by 2015.
In their final statement to the summit, however, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) said the structural causes of hunger and malnutrition had merely intensified since 1996.
"These have forced markets open to dumping of agricultural products, privatization of basic social and economic support institutions, the privatization and commodification of communal and public land, water, fishing grounds and forests.
"Parallel to this, we witness the increasingly brutal repression of social movements resisting the New World Order," the statement said.
Delegates of several nations attending the summit said the four-day event had brought the world no closer to a solution for ending global hunger.
"We have many resources which cannot be exploited because of the state of market relations. We do not have complete access to the market. This summit provided no solution," Kenyan delegate Mr James Aremo said.
A Cambodian delegate, Mr Nody It, said the summit had provided "a lot of talk, but no decision. I expected a different outcome and more participants."
A Tunisian delegate who did not want to be identified said "donor countries did not show up, and nothing can be decided without them."
The summit exposed sharp divisions between rich nations and developing states, which clamoured for more open access to world markets and a reduction in the burden of debt repayments.
Only 74 heads of state and government, instead of the expected 110, attended the summit. Only two of those, Mr Berlusconi and his Spanish counterpart Mr Jose-Maria Aznar, were from the wealthy nations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
AFP