World Leaders Diasagree On Fighting Hunger

World leaders at a U.N.-sponsored food summit vowed Monday to turn words into action and halve the number of hungry people by 2015, but failed to resolve long-standing differences over how to go about it.

Underscoring the divide between the haves and the have-nots, the heads of only two Western countries, Italy and Spain, showed up for the start of the four-day event, which the United Nations has billed as a milestone on the road to eradicating hunger.

By contrast, the leaders of numerous developing nations descended on Rome, including shunned Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, who managed to circumvent a European Union travel ban to attend the meeting.

Against a backdrop of looming famine in southern Africa, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan opened the summit with a ringing call to halt "the gnawing pain of hunger."

"In a world of plenty, ending hunger is within our grasp. Failure to reach this goal should fill every one of us with shame. The time for making promises is over. It is time to act," he said, adding that up to 24,000 people die of hunger each day.

Delegates immediately approved a declaration dubbed the "International Alliance Against Hunger," promising to make good on a pledge issued at a previous food summit in 1996 to cut the number of hungry to 400 million people by 2015 from 840 million.

Since 1996, only an estimated 25 million people have come off the "hungry list" and the U.N. says an additional $24 billion in agricultural aid is needed each year if the target is to be met. At present, just $11 billion is spent annually.

Rich nations are likely to oppose calls for more cash and will also reject demands they slash annual farm subsidies that total around $300 billion. The U.N. says the handouts make it hard for developing countries to compete in global markets.

Although Monday's declaration stated that everyone had "the right...to safe and nutritious food," the United States continued to oppose the clause, fearing future legal claims by famine-stricken countries.

An official at the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which is hosting the summit, said member countries had agreed to a two-year study into the legally-fraught question.

The declaration also skirted around the sensitive issue of genetically modified crops, with the United States pushing for their development in the face of much European skepticism.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said it was in the interests of the West to alleviate hunger, arguing that it lay at the root of illegal immigration and terrorism.

"The ideologies of terror spring up precisely where you find hunger, misery and poverty," Berlusconi said.

He was followed onto the podium by a succession of African leaders -- 23 in all out of a total of 35 heads of state and government who attended Monday's session.

Most attention was focused on Mugabe, who used U.N. diplomatic immunity to attend the meeting, sidestepping a European Union travel ban imposed by the 15-nation bloc because of his treatment of political opponents.

Mugabe denied Western charges that he was partly responsible for food shortages affecting millions of people in Zimbabwe following the invasion of productive, white-owned farms over the past two years by his supporters.

"Zimbabwe's land must rightly belong to Zimbabweans," he told the summit. "Contrary to widely disseminated misrepresentation by our detractors there is now a brighter future for our farming community."

The United Nations has appealed for emergency food aid for six southern African states, where it says more than 12 million people face starvation. Zimbabwe is the worst affected and more than six million of its citizens now risk famine.

While officials talked at the FAO's labyrinthine headquarters in central Rome, nongovernmental organizations held a shadow food summit in a city suburb.

French rebel farmer and anti-globalization guru Jose Bove said the fact that the world's most powerful countries had decided to send relatively junior delegations to the U.N. meeting meant they were not committed to the problem of hunger.

"France is not here... Europe is not here, the United States is not here, All these countries don't care about this. What they want is to sell more food to the southern countries, they don't want these people to have their own agriculture to feed their own population," he told Reuters Television.