U.N. Hunger Summit Fails in Italy

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

By Ivan Simic

17 November 2009, Rome, Italy – UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon opened on Monday, a UN food security summit in Rome, while the troubles of world hunger seemed unimportant to the leaders of the world's wealthiest nations.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is the only leader from the G8 industrialized countries to be among the 60 heads of state and governments, who attended the summit that runs through Wednesday. Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Libya's Muammar Gadafy, are among those in attendance.

The United States, which is the world's biggest food aid donor, sent the acting head of the US Agency for International Development, while Britain sent two junior ministers.

Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary-general, laid out the sobering statistic as he kicked off a three-day summit on world food security in Rome on Monday.

"Today, more than 1 billion people are hungry," he told the assembled leaders. Six million children die of hunger every year, 17000 every day, Ban said.

"We must craft a single global vision ... to produce real results for people in real need," Ban told his audience who gathered at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) headquarters in Rome.

Pope Benedict XVI also addressed ministers, calling for an end to the "greed" of financial speculation on food prices.

Jacques Diouf, the head of the UN food agency urged governments to invest $44 billion a year to end chronic hunger suffered by 1.02 billion people, and achieve “food security.” World hunger has continued to rise, even with food prices falling from their peaks of last year, which coincided with FAO’s previous summit where donors pledged $11 billion in aid.

Jacques Diouf says he is not satisfied with the final declaration of the UN world food summit in Rome. Mr Diouf criticized the declaration - which vowed "urgent action" to boost food security - but did not include the exact targets needed to reduce hunger.

The summit opens with the leaders adopting a declaration in which they renewed their commitment to eradicate hunger. They promised to do so by promoting investment, reversing the decline in funding for agriculture and tackling the effect of global warming on food security. But the final declaration includes only a general promise to pour more money into agricultural aid, with no target or time frame for action.

The summit also rejected a call by the UN to commit £26bn per year to develop agriculture in developing countries. The UN warns that if more land is not used for food production, 370 million people could face famine by 2050.

"There can be no food security without climate security…by 2050 our planet may be the home of 9.1 billion people... by 2050 we know we will need to grow 70 percent more food, yet, weather is becoming more extreme and more unpredictable…this week's food security summit and next month's climate change meeting in Copenhagen must craft a single global vision" Ban told at the summit.

The United Nations seeks pledge from the public as well, having launched an online appeal for individual donations to fight hunger. The World Food Program's (WFP) "Billion for a Billion" campaign aims to reach 1 billion individuals.

"If a billion Internet users donate a dollar or a euro a week, we can transform the lives of a billion hungry people across the world," said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the WFP.

Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe attracted media attention when addressed the summit, and said that the policy under which thousands of white-owned commercial farms were seized in 2000 was a quest for "equity and justice."

"We face very hostile interventions by these states which have imposed unilateral sanctions on us," Mugabe said. "This has had a negative impact on our farmers, who, according to our neocolonialist enemies, must fail so as to damn the land reforms we have undertaken."

Robert Mugabe arrived in Rome on Saturday for the United Nations' food summit, despite EU sanctions that restricts his travel, but was allowed to travel to the meetings that are under the patronage of the UN.