AFRICA/UN World Foot Summit: Against the background of a growing north-south political divide, a senior UN official yesterday urged leaders attending a UN World Food Summit in Rome to stop talking about hunger and start fighting it. Mr James Morris, head of UN aid agency, the World Food Programme (WFP), warned that up to 13 million people in six southern African countries risked starvation unless they received emergency food aid.
"This crisis, coinciding as it does with the summit, challenges us right now to demonstrate to those suffering across the region that we will not forget them."
Mr Morris said that a combination of drought, poor government and the AIDS pandemic have created "the largest single food crisis in the world today".
Mr Morris was speaking on the second day of the World Food Summit, hosted by the UN's Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and held as a follow-up to a similar meeting five years ago which pledged to halve the number of starving people in the world by 2015.
Progress towards realising that target has been disappointing and FAO now estimates that more than 800 million people suffer from daily hunger and deprivation. Accordingly, the FAO has called for an additional $24 billion in agricultural and rural investment.
Even though the 182 countries in attendance on Monday adopted a non-binding resolution renewing their commitment to halving the numbers of the world's hungry, there remains much disagreement about just how to achieve this goal. The very fact that only two Western leaders, the Italian Prime Minister, Mr Silvio Berlusconi, and the Spanish Prime Minister, Mr Jose-Maria Aznar, have attended the summit prompted the Director-General of the FAO, Mr Jacques Diouf, to accuse the developed world of "indifference".
In a BBC radio interview yesterday, however, Ms Clare Short, the British International Development Secretary, defended Britain's decision to send only a junior official. "I'm not sending a minister because I don't expect it to be an effective summit. It \ is an old fashioned UN organisation and it needs improvement."
Ms Short argued that the UN body should improve food-management in developing nations, suggesting that many hungry people lived in countries which had enough food to feed all their population.
In contrast, however, the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, appeared implicitly to criticise the wealthy West when calling for greater access to land, credit, markets and technology for developing world farmers.
Yesterday, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda was more outspoken: "Let's stop beating around the bush. The most fundamental problems are not the weather, are not lack of improved seeds. 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."