Again the fight between wealthy and poor nations is seen at an inter­na­tional sum­mit. The bat­tle is tak­ing cen­ter stage again this week at the UN’s World Food Sum­mit tak­ing place in Rome.

Poor nations attend­ing the sum­mit are crit­i­ciz­ing agri­cul­tural prac­tices of the rich nations. While the rich nations are fight­ing any con­crete dead­lines or new fund­ing lev­els for hunger.

From this story on the sum­mit that we found at the New York Times, writer Neil Mac­Far­quhar describes the battle.

In the hard-fought nego­ti­a­tions over a draft dec­la­ra­tion from the three-day talks, richer nations suc­ceeded in remov­ing a goal to end world hunger by 2025 and declined to com­mit to increas­ing agri­cul­tural aid to nearly 20 per­cent of all inter­na­tional devel­op­ment aid, where it peaked in 1980 before grad­u­ally falling.

Instead, the draft dec­la­ra­tion restated the United Nations tar­get of halv­ing world hunger by 2015 and said that erad­i­cat­ing hunger should come “at the ear­li­est pos­si­ble date.” Diplo­mats from wealth­ier coun­tries argued that cre­at­ing a dead­line for erad­i­cat­ing hunger was unre­al­is­tic, accord­ing to offi­cials involved in the nego­ti­a­tions. The United Nations esti­mates that the num­ber of peo­ple fac­ing hunger around the world rose to more than one bil­lion this year.

The Food and Agri­cul­ture Orga­ni­za­tion of the United Nations had hoped the meet­ing would set an agri­cul­ture aid tar­get of $44 bil­lion annu­ally toward help­ing farm­ers in poorer coun­tries. To meet demand by 2050, agri­cul­ture out­put needs to grow by 70 per­cent, the orga­ni­za­tion said.

The draft dec­la­ra­tion instead com­mits to “sub­stan­tially increase” agri­cul­ture aid. Lead­ers of indus­tri­al­ized nations meet­ing in Italy last July agreed to spend more than $22 bil­lion on agri­cul­ture aid over the next three years, but not all of that con­sti­tutes new aid, and the nations have been slow to fig­ure out how it might be distributed.

The Rome con­fer­ence was prompted by a sharp rise in the price of basic com­modi­ties like rice and wheat that incited food riots in many coun­tries in 2008, a cri­sis that Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations sec­re­tary gen­eral, warned could eas­ily be repeated.

The pope decried the “greed which causes spec­u­la­tion to rear its head even in the mar­ket­ing of cere­als, as if food were to be treated just like any other com­mod­ity.” Ris­ing demand, weather and sup­ply shocks, and not spec­u­la­tion alone, are con­sid­ered to be at the root of the food crisis.

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