UN officials put on a brave face throughout the meeting, held in Rome from Monday to yesterday, and said it had won broad support for the need to focus on longer- term agricultural development — rather than emergency aid — in order to help poor countries feed themselves.
“It’s a half-full, half-empty glass,” said UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) director-general Jacques Diouf, who called the summit to keep attention on the plight of the more than 1-billion people going hungry.
“We made some progress to reverse the decline in agricultural investments ... but it did not go as far as the FAO would have wished to see,” he said.
The no-show by heavyweights from most of the world’s biggest economies lowered the summit’s profile, and did not help efforts to push malnutrition and food shortages to the top of the political agenda.
“It’s a big disappointment that the leaders from the biggest and richest countries did not come,” said Gawain Kripke of aid agency Oxfam. “Without them it’s hard to imagine how the world will attack these challenges of hunger and increasing agricultural productivity,” he said.
Less than a third of the 192 heads of states and governments invited by the FAO showed up.
