/ 14 June 2002

Food summit snubbed by West

The world is in a ”race against the clock” in the war against hunger, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation chief Jacques Diouf said on Thursday at the end of the World Food Summit.

The summit formally came to a close with a reaffirmation of the political will of member states to end hunger, but without a decision on how to achieve it.

Diouf said the countries of the world had begun a ”race against the clock to put our commitments into action, to demonstrate that together we will win the war against hunger and poverty, against scepticism and egotism”.

He urged member states to work ”in the interests of all, rich and poor, to bring into being a more equitable world.

”The right of food comes before anything else,” Diouf said. Host Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, in his closing remarks, identified global hunger, along with terrorism, as ”the biggest problem facing the world”. He said the summit’s conclusions would form part of the work of this month’s G8 richest-nations summit in Canada, and at the European Union summit in Seville in July.

The four-day summit faced a chorus of calls from poor states for improved access to wealthy nations’ markets and a reduction of the debt burden.

The summit’s final declaration had reaffirmed a commitment made at the first World Food Summit in 1996 to cut by half the number of global hungry by 2015.

In their final statement to the summit, however, NGOs said the structural causes of hunger and malnutrition had merely intensified since 1996.

”These have forced markets open to dumping of agricultural products, privatisation of basic social and economic support institutions, the privatisation and commodification of communal and public land, water, fishing grounds and forests. Parallel to this, we witness the increasingly brutal repression of social movements resisting the New World Order,” the statement said.

Delegates of several nations attending the summit said the event had brought the world no closer to a solution for ending global hunger.

”We have many resources that cannot be exploited because of the state of market relations. We do not have complete access to the market. This summit provided no solution,” Kenyan delegate James Aremo told AFP.

A Cambodian delegate, Nody It, said the summit had provided ”a lot of talk, but no decision. I expected a different outcome and more participants.”

A Tunisian delegate who did not want to be identified said ”donor countries did not show up, and nothing can be decided without them”.

The summit exposed sharp divisions between rich nations and developing states, which clamoured for more open access to world markets and a reduction in the burden of debt repayments.

Western governments appeared to snub the UN and Third World countries by sending civil servants and ministers rather than prime ministers and presidents, with Britain sending the lowest-ranked delegation of all. Only 74 heads of state and government, instead of the expected 110, attended the summit. Only two of those, Berlusconi and his Spanish counterpart Jose-Maria Aznar, were from the wealthy nations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The fact that the United States, Germany, France, Denmark and Canada, among others, sent delegations led by agriculture ministers rather than prime ministers was widely interpreted as a pre-emptive rejection of the request for more money.

One EU government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was not thought worthwhile sending high-powered delegations because the summit would achieve little except for rhetoric. The mayor of Rome, Walter Veltroni, said it was absurd that Western leaders found time for G8 summits but not those aimed at easing global poverty and inequality.

”We have a good indication of the political priority that is given to the tragedy of hunger,” Diouf said. Environmental and anti-globalisation groups in Rome for a parallel food summit denounced the absences as shameful indifference to the hungry.