UN food summit to back new strategy against hunger

By ARIEL DAVID

ROME

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 Food and Agriculture Organization says.

The draft document, negotiated by delegates from the organization's 192 member countries, is meant to lay out a strategy that focuses on the development of countries struggling to feed their people.

The delegation from the United States, the world's No. 1 food donor, said the draft succeeded in uniting the world behind a new approach to fight its hunger problem.

That strategy places up front the needs of small farmers in the developing world, who could feed themselves and their compatriots if only they had access to basic things like seeds, tools, irrigation systems as well as infrastructure such as storage facilities or roads from fields to markets.

Humanitarian groups lamented, 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.

Richer countries would continue to provide food aid to those in need while working to eradicate the root causes of hunger in the medium and long term.

Officials hope the draft can be approved by attending leaders on the first day of next week's summit at the U.N. organization's headquarters. The Food and Agriculture Organization says some 60 heads of state are expected to show up, and Pope Benedict XVI will also take part to add his voice to the urgent calls for a solution to hunger.

The Rome-based agency says falling agricultural investment in developing countries over the last decades has helped lead to rising hunger worldwide. Its officials say low food prices gave the impression that investment in the sector was no longer needed and the complexity of agriculture projects diverted funds to other areas of development.

The share of international aid going to agriculture went from 19 percent in 1980 to 3.8 percent in 2006, though the trend has slightly reversed since then, according to the draft.

Hunger "is an unacceptable blight on the lives, livelihoods and dignity of one-sixth of the world's population," the draft says. "The effects of long-standing underinvestment in food security, agriculture, and rural development have recently been further exacerbated by food, financial and economic crises, among other factors."

U.N. officials had pushed to include a 2025 deadline to defeat hunger. Instead the document promises renewed efforts to meet a goal set nine years ago to cut the number of hungry people in half by 2015 and commits to "eradicating hunger at the earliest possible date."

The Food and Agriculture Organization also hoped the summit would pledge to allocate 17 percent, or $44 billion, of international aid to agriculture in order to push global food output up by 70 percent and feed a projected population of 9.1 billion in 2050.

Ertharin Cousin, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. agencies in Rome, said donor countries should follow the specific needs of each nation rather than allocate a fixed percentage of aid for agriculture to the entire developing world.

"How much goes to agriculture is directly related to what benefit agriculture has in a particular country," Cousin said in an interview. "Some countries have education needs, HIV issues, or other health concerns that will require higher" aid.

Cousin also said it was important to work achieve the 2015 goal of halving hunger before setting other deadlines.

The draft is largely based on the strategy that was first laid out at this summer's Group of Eight summit in L'Aquila, central Italy, where President Barack Obama and other leaders pledged $20 billion for seeds, fertilizers, tools and other aid for small farmers in poor countries over the next three years.

With the Food and Agriculture Organization declaration backing that strategy, "they are no longer principles that were simply adopted by the G-8," Cousin said. "They are principles for the entire world to support sustainable agricultural development."

The Oxfam and ActionAid humanitarian groups contended in a joint statement that the draft "says little new" and there are no guarantees the nonbinding document will change aid policies.

"It says hunger will be halved by 2015 but fails to commit any new resources to achieve this or provide any way of holding governments to account," said Francisco Sarmento, ActionAid's food rights coordinator. "Unfortunately the poor cannot eat promises."

The 8-page draft also commits countries to help farmers in the developing world gain access to safe biotechnologies and other innovations as well as adapt to or mitigate the effects of climate change.

It pushes for more private investment in agriculture.

----

On the Net:

http://www.fao.org/

----

AP Business Writer Colleen Barry contributed to this report from Milan.