World leaders at UN summit vow to aid farmers in bid to help starving
World leaders at a United Nations food summit in Rome today agreed a strategy to help the world's one billion starving people by increasing aid to farmers in developing countries - but failed to pledge the specific funds the UN had hoped for.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), which is hosting the three day summit at its Rome headquarters near the Circus Maximus, had asked for a committment of $44 billion (£26.2 bn) a year for agricultural aid. It had also asked summit delegates to make 2025 a deadline for eradicating world hunger altogether.
Instead they confirmed the current target, first agreed to nine years ago, of halving the number of chronically hungry by 2015.
The summit has been called to debate the global food distribution system and ways of making Third World nations self-sufficient in food supplies. According to the FAO, although crop figures have been high this year 31 countries which are net importers of food have suffered from high food prices because of the global recession.
The FAO's annual report on food security says that as a result over one billion people are suffering from chronic malnutrition, with 20 million starving people in East Africa in need of emergency food aid.
Aid experts were sceptical about the summit before it even opened. The Italian press predicted that "the heads of states will gather in Rome, deliver numerous speeches, shake hands in front of cameras, but will not meet FAO's demand to spend $44 billion on agriculture each year, and will not declare the year 2025 a deadline to eradicate famine".
Pope Benedict XVI was among the opening speakers this morning. The only G8 head of government to attend was Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy. He is accused by critics of attending only to avoid having to appear at a corruption trial in Milan, the first since he lost his self-awarded immunity from prosecution last month.
The FAO said that the way to tackle hunger was to help Third World farmers to help themselves by supplying agricultural equipment, irrigation technology, fertilisers and high-yield seed rather than food aid. It said the international community had "neglected agriculture for many years ... sustained investment in agriculture — especially smallholder agriculture — is acknowledged as the key to food security."
Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary-General, told the summit: "The world has more than enough food, yet today more than one billion people are hungry. This is unacceptable."
He said the world could not achieve food security without tackling global warming, noting the link between the World Food Summit and the Copenhagen summit on climate change next month.
"Food security and climate change are deeply interconnected," he said. "Agricultural land is drying up." He said that if the glaciers of the Himalayas melted this would would affect the livelihoods of up to a billion people throughout Asia, while African farmers could see their harvests drop by 50 per cent over the next ten years. "The food crisis of today is a wake-up call for tomorrow."
At a meeting of First Ladies on the eve of the FAO summit Azam al-Sadat Farahi, the wife of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said that capitalism was the root cause of world poverty. Making her first public speech, and wearing a black chador, she said that in Iran women were guaranteed food, clothing and shelter by their husbands.
Karimi Davood, of the association of Iranian political refugees in Italy, protested that Mr Ahmadinejad's wife represented a regime guilty of the "bloody suppression of peaceful protests in Iran for freedom and democracy" and called on the Italian authorities to expel her.