ROME: “Failure to reach the goal should fill every one of us with shame.” United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan could hardly have been more blunt. He was speaking to world leaders at a meeting in Rome called to assess progress towards a target that was agreed at the World Food Summit in 1996.

The governments of 186 countries then agreed to a “Plan of Action,” with the goal of reducing the number of undernourished people “to half their present level no later than 2015.”

Halving hunger by 2015 would have meant reducing the number — 800 million in 1996 — by 22 million a year. But the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) figures suggest that the progress towards the target is a long way behind schedule, with the number falling by only six million a year. At that rate, the goal of even halving hunger will not be met for more than 60 years.

Failure to reach the goal did not seem to fill Western leaders with shame, however. They stayed away in droves, with only two of them bothering to turn up. By contrast the leaders of more than 70 developing countries came to Rome to share their views.

FAO director-general, Jacques Diouf, blames the failure to meet the target on “lack of political will.” NGOs, meeting in Rome at the same time as world leaders, think he’s wrong. “(The 1996 Plan of Action) has not failed because of a lack of political will,” they said in a statement, “but because it supports policies that lead to hunger.”

Globalization and liberalization, for example, have thrown million of small-scale farmers off their land and “intensified the structural problems of hunger and malnutrition.”

The NGOs were highly critical of the declaration adopted by leaders, called the “International Alliance Against Hunger.” This resolves to accelerate progress towards the target that was agreed in 1996, but it calls for “more of the same failed medicine,” say NGOs.

At the insistence of the United States, the declaration calls for research into new technologies “including biotechnology.” The US administration sees genetically modified (GM) crops as a way of increasing food output.

The NGOs point out, however, that the world food problem is not lack of food overall, but lack of access to food by those who are hungry.

They believe that priority should be given to food sovereignty — “the right of people to define their own agricultural, labour, fishing, food and land policies.”

And GM crops, they maintain, are a threat to small farmers, as witness the contamination of traditional maize crops by GM maize in Mexico.—Dawn/The Observer News Service.