Sour end to hunger summit

Delegates from 180 nations but few world leaders have been in Rome

ROME, Italy -- The United Nations World Food Summit has ended with stirring speeches -- but also caustic criticism charging it with failing to tackle global hunger.

Delegates heading home from Rome on Thursday after the four-day speech marathon with a new pledge to accelerate efforts to reduce the number of people without enough to eat from 800 million to 400 million by 2015.

But critics say this pledge is exactly the same as that made by the organisation five years ago -- and the latest estimate of world's hungry is around 794 million.

"Since '96, they keep failing," said Emiliano Ezcurra of Greenpeace. "They invested millions in this summit, and one by one all the ministers on the podium recognised that they are failing," he told The Associated Press.

Besides Italy and Spain, no other wealthy country sent a top level delegation to Rome. Britain went one further and did not even address the event.

"I'm not sending a minister because I don't expect it to be an effective summit," Clare Short, Britain's overseas development secretary said.

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There were attempts to rally the delegates to action on the final day.

"Let's start the race against time now and show that together we can win the war against hunger and poverty, against scepticism and egoism," FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf said in the closing session.

Indicating that the haves should do more for the have-nots, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said the defeat of global hunger was to everyone's benefit.

"The problem of hungry people in the world is, after terrorism, or indeed alongside terrorism, the most serious problem facing the international community," he said.

"One must remember that a starving man is a desperate man, perhaps even a dangerous one," he added.

The goals of this week's summit were modest to begin with: FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf merely wanted countries to reaffirm their commitments to cut in half the number of hungry and accelerate efforts to counter hunger around the world.

A non-binding resolution adopted on the first day of the summit went a small step further, calling for the creation of a voluntary set of guidelines that recognises the right to food for the world's six billion people.

Nevertheless, environmentalist groups say the summit took a step back because it called for advancement in biotech research, which many groups say hurts rather than helps the fight against hunger.

On the last full day of the summit, environmentalists and farming advocates got their first real chance to debate with summit delegates, with many dismissing the U.S. argument that biotech crops are the answer to hunger.

They said food security rests in biological diversity, which they said is being lost through high-yield varieties of seeds being pushed by U.S. biotech corporations.

Nearly 13 million are close to starvation in six southern African countries

Fred Kalibwani, an ecology activist from a Zimbabwe-based non-governmental organisation, said the development of genetically modified seeds represented "the onslaught of patenting on life forms," because it puts food security in the hands of a few corporations.

"This will be tragic for Africa in the next few years," he said.

To try to maintain crop biodiversity, a group of organisations announced on Wednesday the creation of a permanent endowment to conserve seeds. They are seeking $260 million from donors to maintain gene banks that would allow farmers around the globe access to a variety of seeds and plant materials.

Separately, farmers groups also complained directly to the U.N. about the threat of genetically modified foods being introduced through food aid shipments to regions that do not allow biotech foods.

Ana Bravo, biotech coordinator of Ecuador-based Friends of the Earth, said she brought a message to the World Food Programme demanding that it refuse to accept biotech food donations.

WFP spokesman Francis Mwanza told AP that the WFP did not require donor countries to specify if the food aid they are giving is biotech-free. All it requires is that the food be certified as safe from the donating country and in line with U.N. regulations.

Recipient countries can refuse it, but none has, WFP chief James Morris said.

Zimbabwe recently balked at accepting a U.S. shipment of maize because it was not guaranteed to be biotech-free, Mwanza said.