THE CUBAN President, Dr Fidel Castro, stole the show at the World Food Summit in Rome. He angrily branded the developed nations of the first world as "hypocritical", calling United Nations plans to reduce the world's starving (estimated at 840 million) by 50 per cent over the next 20 years a "shamefully modest objective".
Speaking at the summit on Saturday, Dr Castro said: "Capitalism, neoliberalism, the laws of a wild [free trade] marketplace, external debt, under development. . . kill people.
Hunger, the inseparable companion of the poor, is the offspring of unequal distribution of wealth and of the injustices in this world. The rich do not know hunger."
Dr Castro is to meet the Pope in Rome tomorrow.
The five day UN World Food Summit closed yesterday with the formal endorsement of the "Rome Declaration and Plan of Action", a non binding document signed by 173 countries and intended to guarantee world food security.
The plan is intended to lay the basis for increasing the world's food production and availability by 75 per cent by the year 2030 without in the meantime destroying the world's natural resources.
Given President's Castro's charismatic personality and his role as one of the few remaining communist leaders on the world stage, his address inevitably commanded huge attention. The assembly hall where people paid so little attention to the vast majority of speakers that delegates had to be continually asked to stop talking, was deadly still for Dr Castro's address on Saturday.
The Cuban leader's angry denunciation inevitably prompted some of the fundamental questions which have underlined this week's work. Is a summit which cost approximately 7 million to stage not obliged to come up with something more than a non binding, non enforceable and perhaps little monitored "Plan of Action"? Even if the "Plan of Action" was faithfully adhered to by signatory countries, is the Cuban leader correct in calling it "shamefully modest"?
Many of the addresses were passionless and anodyne, listing a series of factors crucial to guaranteeing world food security - international solidarity; agricultural planning; efficient marketing, processing and distribution of food; the prevention of land degradation; and the harnessing of the Earth's limited water supplies.
Where speakers differed was over the question of political responsibility, with several developed world leaders calling for the Third World to assume more responsibility for itself and suggesting that food security is intimately linked to conditions of freedom and democracy.
Typical of this trend was the speech by the German Agriculture Minister, Mr Jochen Borchert, who said: "Social and economic success and efficient, environmentally sound farming are best achieved where human rights are respected and freedom and democracy reign."
Many developing world leaders, however, took a line similar to President Castro, pointing to the "scandal" of excessive armaments spending by western powers which at the same time continue to burden the Third World with unacceptable levels of external debt.
Typical of this trend was the Bangladesh Prime Minister, Sheik Hasna, who said that given that the threat of conflict between east and west no longer existed, the world's hungry were now asking "What are we all and the world powers waiting for to use the huge resources swallowed up by our budgets for human destruction to engage in outright battle with poverty and hunger? The hungry cannot wait."