Only one G8 leader will attend this week's annual gathering at FAO, writes PADDY AGNEWin Rome
NOT FOR the first time in recent years, a United Nations world summit on food security will open in Rome this morning against a background that ranges from pessimistic alarmism from the organisers to apparent indifference from the world’s wealthiest nations, with Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi the only G8 leader expected to attend.
Jacques Diouf, head of the UN’s Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said 1.02 billion people now live in chronic hunger, so much so that a child dies of hunger every six seconds.
Launching a “Billion for a Billion” campaign for individual donations to help shore up a serious funding shortfall, Josette Sheeran, head of the UN’s World Food Programme, said one in six people “now has urgent emergency hunger needs”.
Despite the alarmist rhetoric, many question if this summit will make any serious headway in the fight against hunger.
The summit’s final draft declaration, as leaked to media sources last week, would seem to be strong on a generic boost for agricultural aid to poor countries but rather vague on targets and deadlines.
FAO had hoped to win a clear pledge by world leaders to spend $44 billion dollars per annum to help poor nations feed themselves. In what was perceived as an attempt to implement a longer-term strategy, the world’s leaders at the G8 summit in L’Aquila in July pledged $20 billion (€13.4 billion) over three years to help farmers in poor nations.
FAO had hoped to build on this momentum, raising the percentage of official aid spent on agriculture to 17 per cent, as opposed to the current 5 per cent.
Aid groups such as Oxfam and ActionAid have already suggested this week’s summit could be a “waste of time and money”, arguing that unless world leaders intervene, they risk “throwing away a great chance to stop more than one billion people from going hungry”.
“The [draft] declaration is just a rehash of old platitudes,” said Francesco Sarmento, ActionAid’s food rights co-ordinator last week.
“It says hunger will be halved by 2015 but fails to commit any new resources to achieve this or provide any way of holding governments to account through the UN’s Committee on Food Security. Unfortunately, the poor cannot eat promises.” While G8 leaders will be conspicuous by their absence, more than 60 world leaders including Brazilian president Lula da Silva, Libyan leader Col Muammar Gadafy, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe are scheduled to attend. Ireland will be represented by the Minister for Food and Horticulture, Trevor Sargent TD, who is due to address the summit tomorrow.
This morning’s opening session will begin with an address from Pope Benedict XVI. The international farmer’s movement, La Via Campesina, says it will be holding “a meaningful and imaginative event” alongside the summit to show it is possible for the world’s 1.4 billion small farmers to cover all of the world’s food needs.