Next week, the United Nations hosts a food sum­mit. Ahead of the gath­er­ing offi­cials are prepar­ing a state­ment that will be rat­i­fied by Nation’s members.

The draft of the doc­u­ment makes promises for all nations to make com­bat­ing hunger a pri­or­ity. Human­i­tar­ian aid groups say that the lan­guage within the draft is not tough enough.

From this Asso­ci­ated Press arti­cle that is hosted at Google News, writer Ariel David took a peek at the document.

A draft dec­la­ra­tion for next week’s U.N. food sum­mit would com­mit world lead­ers to a new hunger-fighting strat­egy by pledg­ing to increase agri­cul­tural devel­op­ment aid to help the world’s 1 bil­lion hun­gry peo­ple feed themselves.

How­ever, the draft obtained Thurs­day by The Asso­ci­ated Press does not include a 2025 dead­line for erad­i­cat­ing hunger, a goal sought by the United Nations.

Also miss­ing are spe­cific money com­mit­ments, such as the $44 bil­lion in yearly agri­cul­tural aid that the U.N. Food and Agri­cul­ture Orga­ni­za­tion says will be nec­es­sary in the com­ing decades.

Hunger now affects a record 1.02 bil­lion peo­ple glob­ally — or one in six — with the finan­cial melt­down, high food prices, drought and war blamed for recent increases, the FAO says.
…

Human­i­tar­ian groups said, how­ever, that the doc­u­ment was weak, and that the three-day Rome sum­mit start­ing Mon­day could fail if world lead­ers don’t allo­cate new resources and come up with mech­a­nisms to hold gov­ern­ments to their commitments.

Under the draft, devel­oped coun­tries would “com­mit to a cru­cial, deci­sive shift” that aims to “sub­stan­tially increase the share” of aid invested in agri­cul­ture to help the world’s poor become less depen­dent on direct food assistance.