Annan calls for action – not promises – at World Food Summit

Lamenting the slow progress in fighting starvation worldwide, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan today urged a high-level summit on hunger to increase efforts to eliminate food shortages, including examining ways to promote agricultural and rural development.

In an opening address to the "World Food Summit: five years later" in Rome, the Secretary-General called hunger "one of the worst violations of human dignity" and decried the slow progress in cutting by half the number of hungry people around the globe.

"We need an anti-hunger programme that could become a common framework around which global and national capacities to fight hunger can be mobilized," Mr. Annan stressed.

The Secretary-General noted that every day, more than 800 million people worldwide - among them 300 million children - suffered "the gnawing pain of hunger," and the diseases or disabilities caused by malnutrition.

"There is no point in making further promises today," Mr. Annan said. "This Summit must give renewed hope to those 800 million people by agreeing on concrete action."

The Secretary-General also warned that several countries in southern Africa "are facing a risk of outright famine over the coming months."

Delegations from more than 180 countries are attending the Summit, which aims to revive political will and mobilize political resources to reduce by half - to around 400 million - the number of hungry people by 2015, a pledge made originally at the UN World Food Summit in 1996.

For his part, Jacques Diouf, the Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the lead agency organizing the Summit, said that "six years after the World Food Summit 1996, death continues to stalk the magnitude of hungry people on our planet. Promises have not been kept. Worse, actions have not reflected words. Regrettably, the political will and financial resources have not matched the mark of human solidarity."

Stressing the negative impact of hunger on the economies of those countries that it afflicts, Mr. Diouf said it causes an estimated 1 per cent loss each year in rate of economic growth through reduced productivity and nutritional disease. "Eliminating hunger is a moral imperative, pertaining to the most basic of human rights - the right to exist," he said.

Meanwhile UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, said the goal to free humanity from the scourge of hunger was within reach, but insufficient national and international action has meant that the right to food was far from being realized.

The High Commissioner noted that national strategies based on human rights principles to ensure food and nutritional security remained the exception, rather than the rule, and urged countries to review their policies to define a coherent framework to eliminate hunger.