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World leaders' low turnout hits UN food summit

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-11-19 02:00

UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Director-General Jacques Diouf speaks during a news conference at the end of the hunger summit in Rome November 18, 2009. [Agencies]

ROME: An absence of many world leaders undermined this week's UN food summit from the start, and its final declaration shows little progress was made in the fight against hunger.

UN officials put on a brave face throughout the Nov. 16-18 Rome meeting, saying it had won broad support for the need to focus on longer-term agricultural development -- rather than emergency aid -- to help poor countries feed themselves.

"It's a half-full, half-empty glass," said Jacques Diouf, Director General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, who had called the summit to keep attention high on the plight of the more than one billion people going hungry.

"We made some progress to reverse the decline in agricultural investments ... but it did not go as far as FAO would have wished to see," he told the final news conference.

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The no-show by heayweights from most of the world's biggest economies lowered the summit's profile, and did not help efforts to push malnutrition and food shortages to the top of the political agenda.

"It's a big disappointment that the leaders from the biggest and richest countries did not come," said Gawain Kripke of aid agency Oxfam.

"Without them it's hard to imagine how the world will attack these challenges of hunger and increasing agricultural productivity," he said, adding that the summit had thrown only "crumbs" to those who do not have enough food to eat.

Less than a third of the 192 heads of states and governments invited by the FAO showed up, with many countries sending their agriculture ministers instead.

Italy's Silvio Berlusconi was the only G8 head of government at the summit -- as the leader of the host country he all but had to attend, and by doing so he won a delay in a corruption trial against him which had been due to restart on Monday.