Critics say U.N. food summit wasteful, ineffective

ROME — Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, blamed for plunging his people into starvation, used his platform as Tuesday's opening speaker at the U.N. anti-hunger summit to decry what he called his neocolonialist foes.

Another longtime African strongman, Moammar Gadhafi, held another nightly soiree at a villa in the Italian capital in the company of hundreds of young ladies selected by a "hostess" agency.

Tunisia's first lady and her bodyguards blocked traffic on roads leading to Via Condotti, a glamorous street of designer boutiques near the Spanish Steps. Rome daily Il Messaggero ran a photo of Leila Zine in front of luxury jewelry store Bulgari.

The images bolstered criticism that the summit called by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization is long on rhetoric and extravagance and short on solutions for the world's 1 billion hungry.

The meeting was branded a failure within a couple of hours of its start after the 192 participating countries unanimously rebuffed the United Nations' appeal for commitments of billions of dollars in yearly aid to develop agriculture in poor nations.

None of the leaders of the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations attended except for Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi.

"There is a clear disconnect between what governments are saying, at least the rich governments, and what in fact they are doing," said Flavio Valente, an activist participating in a forum of NGOs held in parallel with the summit.

The G-8 meeting in L'Aquila, Italy, essentially set the agenda for this latest summit by endorsing a strategy shift in fighting hunger: helping farmers in poor country to produce enough food to feed their own people, moving away from decades-long reliance on handouts.

While the G-8 leaders in July approved $20 billion in agricultural development aid in a three-year package, the countries at this U.N. summit rejected FAO's call to commit themselves to earmark 17 percent of their foreign aid budgets for agricultural development, which U.N. officials estimated would cost $44 billion yearly.

Ertharin Cousin, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. agencies in Rome, said the summit wanted to establish the principle that donors should listen to the needs of each country and not decide aid policies on their own.

FAO director-general Jacques Diouf expressed "regret" and frustration that the summit rejected his call to members to fund the new shift in agricultural development policy.