South African President Thabo Mbeki on Sunday strongly criticised rich nations for their lack of commitment against hunger, reflected when only two top Western leaders came to last week’s Rome food summit.
He said it was just not ”right” that the leaders of the Nato alliance and Russia all travelled to Rome in late May for a defence summit ”but they would not come to discuss the question of the 800-million” people in the world threatened by starvation.
”It was not the correct thing to do,” Mbeki told South African public television SABC. ”We (referring to the 74 heads of state mostly from developing countries present at the summit) discussed the matter.
”We took various decisions and all of us need to act as strongly as we can to address this problem of poverty,” the president added. ”People are actually dying of hunger. We have to do something to assist one another with regard to all of this.”
Italian and Spanish prime ministers Silvio Berlusconi and Jose Maria Aznar were the only leaders of the 28 most-industrialised countries to attend the second World Food Summit in Rome, which concluded on Thursday.
Aznar’s Spain will hand over the rotating EU presidency to Denmark at the end of this month. The summit, which pointed up sharp divisions between rich and poor states over how to tackle the crisis, ended with the 183 member states of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reaffirming their will to halve the number of hungry by 2015, but without a binding decision on how to achieve the target. – Sapa