World leaders and government officials at World Summit on Food Security in Rome agreed to boost agricultural aid to poor nations, but set no targets or timeframes for action.
A final declaration adopted on the first day of the Rome summit made no mention of a proposal to raise farm aid to $44 billion a year, as the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has requested.
Countries also agreed to work to reverse the decline in domestic and international funding for agriculture and promote new investment in the sector, to improve governance of global food issues in partnership with relevant stakeholders from the public and private sector, and to proactively face the challenges of climate change to food security.
Around 60 world leaders attended the summit and have vowed to take urgent action to combat global food shortages. Some leaders, however, namely Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, lashed out at what they called unfair agricultural policies by developed nations.
In the tight negotiations over a draft declaration from the three-day talks, richer nations did their utmost to remove a goal to end world hunger by 2025 and declined to commit to increasing agricultural aid to nearly 20% of all international development aid, where it peaked in 1980 before gradually falling.
The draft declaration instead commits to a "substantially increase" in agriculture aid. G8 leaders meeting in L'Aquila (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.
Jacques Diouf, director-general of the host organisation, the UN's Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), could not hide his dissatisfaction. He said he regretted that the FAO declaration had failed to come up with "quantifiable data and deadlines" in relation to the world food crisis.
Solving climate change and food security together
Speaking at the summit in Rome, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that failure at next month's international climate change negotiations would result in a further rise in hunger.
"There cannot be food security without climate security," Mr Ban said. "Today's event is critical," he added, referring to the food summit, and "so is Copenhagen".
Holding up a small plastic cup at last night's news conference, Josette Sheeran, head of the UN's World Food Programme (WFP), said that the food emergency was so chronic that one billion people would not be able to fill the cup with food this morning.
She said the food crisis was not only an economic and humanitarian emergency but also a question of world peace and security. Despite this, many noted that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was the only G8 leader to attend the summit.
