Food Summit Ends Amid Controversy

The U.N. Food Summit ended Thursday with a defense by the organizers of its relevance and criticism from advocacy groups that it failed to make headway in the fight against hunger.

Jacques Diouf, director-general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, said the summit had achieved concrete goals in accelerating efforts to feed the world's hungry and had attracted a record number of participants.

He finally released figures of who those participants were, acknowledging that only 74 heads of state and government had shown up, representing 181 countries. U.N. officials had refused to give out the figures all week, amid criticism that Western leaders had snubbed the event.

Diouf acknowledged in an interview that the absence of all but two leaders of the industrialized world "sends the wrong signal. Because again, human relations is not only about numbers and figures. It is about psychology."

Nevertheless, he defended the summit outcome at a press conference, saying: "We unanimously adopted a declaration with participation of all world countries who agreed about what has to be done. So how can it be said that this summit served no purpose?"

He was responding to comments by the head of Britain's development department, Clare Short, that she wasn't even sending a minister to the summit because she didn't think it would accomplish anything.

Advocates of the poor, environmental and farmers' groups also called the summit useless, saying the outcome favored the interests of U.S. biotech corporations, and not the world's hungry.

The summit delegates pledged to accelerate efforts to bring the number of people without enough to eat from 800 million to 400 million by 2015.

That goal was set in 1996, and while there have been some gains in the fight, the total number of hungry people remains as it was in 1996 because of the growth of the world's population.

Delegates promised to step up efforts to meet the 1996 goal and went a small step further, calling for the creation of a voluntary set of guidelines that recognizes the right to food for the world's 6 billion people.

In addition, 43 countries took advantage of the summit to sign a treaty on plant biodiversity, bringing the total to 56.

But non-governmental organizations attending a parallel food conference said the outcome wasn't enough. They issued a final evaluation Thursday, expressing their "collective disappointment in, and rejection of," the final document.

"Far from analyzing and correcting the problems that have made it impossible to make progress over the past five years toward eliminating hunger, this new plan of action compounds the error of 'more of the same failed same medicine' with destructive prescriptions that will make the situation even worse," a statement said.

In particular, they complained that the final declaration called for advancement in biotech research, which many groups say hurts rather than helps the fight against hunger and merely benefits U.S. biotech corporations.

Diouf himself said he thought biotech's role in ending world hunger was "marginal" and that the more important issue was getting enough water to the world's farmers.