A three-day United Nations food summit marked by the failure to secure substantial new funds to feed the world"s more than one billion hungry people, wrapped up in Rome today, according to dpa. "I would have wished for clear, quantitative targets ... and clear dates on which to achieve these," said UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Director-General Jacques Diouf. He also expressed disappointment that only around 60 of FAO"s 192 member-nations were represented by their heads of state or government, most of them choosing to send agriculture ministers instead. Food production "is not within the remit of agriculture ministries," Diouf said. He stressed that only government leaders can approve the sort of budgets needed to fund irrigation and fertilizer technologies, as well as infrastructure for storage and roads for transport of produce. FAO, which hosted the summit, estimates that some 44 billion dollars needs to be invested in agriculture annually to combat hunger. That would equal 17 per cent of all official development aid instead of the current 5 per cent. Participants renewed a pledge made at a similar FAO summit in 1996, to halve the number of hungry people by 2015. However, while the final declaration also committed participants to the eradication of hunger, no time-frame was set for this. The document, which was already approved on Monday shortly after the summit began, did not tie signatories to any sum of money. "A single meeting can"t solve world hunger, but we certainly expected far more than this," a development group Oxfam, spokeswoman Gawain Kripke said. "The near total absence of rich country leaders sent a poor message from the beginning. The summit offered few solid accomplishments," she added.
