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ROME: A UN summit vowed Thursday to halve global hunger by 2015 and
take “urgent” action over the global food crisis, but only after
going into overtime at a fractious summit in Rome.
In a final declaration at the gathering which
featured some $6.5 billion (4.1 billion euros) pledged but exposed
strains notably over biofuels, world leaders also agreed to boost
food production in poor countries.
“We are convinced that the international
community needs to take urgent and coordinated action to combat the
negative impacts of soaring prices on the world’s most vulnerable
countries and populations,” it said.
The summit was an “important first step” but
not sufficient to tackle the global food crisis, British charity
Oxfam said.
Oxfam Chief Executive Barbara Stocking said in a
statement that while leaders of the world’s richest countries had
“acknowledged the importance of aid to agriculture,” the global
food crisis needed “a wide-ranging plan to resolve it.”
“As the world’s most powerful countries,
they must provide more money to deal with the immediate impact of
the current crisis but also tackle some of the contributing causes
by ending compulsory biofuels targets and providing more long term
aid for agriculture,” she said.
“The current crisis illustrates starkly that
what we need is not business as usual but deep reform of the
international trading system,” she said.
The declaration was criticized even before it
was formally agreed, with Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini
calling it “disappointing.”
The text was “unfortunately very watered down
with respect to the initial ambitions,” he said, cited by the ANSA
news agency.
-- AFP
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