The three day World Food Sum­mit has now con­cluded in Rome. Accord­ing to all anti-hunger advo­cates it was a failure.

A cou­ple of rea­sons are given for why the sum­mit failed to come up with fund­ing goals or a dead­line for end­ing hunger. Some point to the lack of any abil­ity of the UN’s Food and Agri­cul­tural Orga­ni­za­tion to bully devel­oped nations into action. Oth­ers say it’s a lack of inter­est by any elected offi­cials of the devel­oped world over peo­ple starv­ing to death.

From the IPS, writer Paul Virgo gives us the analysis.

At best it reflects the lim­its of the U.N. and its flag­ship body in the fight against hunger, the Food and Agri­cul­ture Organ­i­sa­tion (FAO), activists say.

At worst, they say it shows wealthy coun­tries’ lead­ers lack the polit­i­cal will to really to put their backs into solv­ing a prob­lem that — no mat­ter how unjust and scan­dalous, in a world with more than enough to feed every­one — gen­er­ally does not directly affect the vot­ers who put them into office.

Either way it is prob­a­bly bad news for the 1.02 bil­lion peo­ple, almost one sixth of the global pop­u­la­tion, who go to bed every night with empty stomachs.

FAO Direc­tor Gen­eral Jacques Diouf tried to make the best of it Mon­day after the approval of a tooth­less declaration.

He pointed out con­sen­sus had been achieved on the need to end the long– run­ning decline in agri­cul­tural invest­ment, which is one of the major rea­sons many peo­ple in rural areas of devel­op­ing coun­tries strug­gle to feed themselves.

But, Diouf admit­ted “regret” that coun­tries had failed to com­mit them­selves to wip­ing out hunger by 2025 and that devel­oped nations had not agreed to allo­cate 44 bil­lion dol­lars in aid to agri­cul­ture per year.

That fig­ure sounds like an awful lot of money, but it was not such an ambi­tious tar­get if one con­sid­ers other ways money is spent.
…

The sum­mit was skipped by all but one of the lead­ers of coun­tries in the Group of Eight lead­ing world eco­nomic pow­ers — Ital­ian Pre­mier Sil­vio Berlus­coni, who only had to take a short drive from his office to reach the FAO’s headquarters.

The G8 pledged to devote 20 mil­lion dol­lars to agri­cul­tural aid over the next three years at the L’Aquila sum­mit in July. So some believe the no-shows here imply they want to imple­ment their food secu­rity poli­cies via G8 organs or other bod­ies, such as the World Bank, which has fre­quently been accused of infring­ing national sov­er­eignty by try­ing to pro­mote mod­els of devel­op­ment imported from the West that are not appro­pri­ate in poorer countries.

“The absence of the G8 lead­ers is a clear mes­sage that the rich coun­tries are still try­ing to impose their poli­cies on poor coun­tries,” said Ser­gio Marelli, head of the asso­ci­a­tion of Ital­ian non-governmental organ­i­sa­tions (NGOs).

“Agro-food poli­cies and man­age­ment of resources for their imple­men­ta­tion can only be the com­pe­tence of the spe­cialised United Nations agen­cies, above all the FAO and the Inter­na­tional Fund for Agri­cul­tural Devel­op­ment, and should not be handed to the World Bank,” Marelli said. “We believe assign­ing the World Bank the role of policy-maker would mean giv­ing it back to the insti­tu­tion that has the great­est respon­si­bil­ity for the cur­rent food crisis.”