ROME: When plant expert Geoffrey Hawtin got up to speak at this week’s UN World Food Summit in Rome, he addressed rows of empty seats.

It was evening and the hundreds of delegates in Rome for the four-day anti-hunger event had long gone, abandoning the labyrinthine summit venue to the cleaners and final speakers.

“There are probably too many summits,” said a philosophical Hawtin, who is director general of the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute.

The central message of this week’s discussions, which were aimed at rekindling enthusiasm for the drive to halve world hunger by 2015, certainly seemed to get buried under an avalanche of controversy.

Western leaders largely shunned the event, the heads of developing nations accused the major powers of ignoring the plight of the poor, the European Union said the meeting was trapped in inertia, while Britain said it was a waste of time.

Coming as it did just days after the failure of ministers to agree to a draft action plan for a major UN Earth Summit in South Africa later this year, the Rome gathering added to growing scepticism about the purpose of such meetings.

The aims are often worthy, the results are often limited.

Back in 1996, the first World Food Summit ended with ringing calls to cut the number of hungry people to 400 million from an estimated 840 million. Six years later and the number has fallen to just around 800 million — well behind schedule.

There is no guarantee that this week’s set of glossy promises won’t also be broken and some charity workers attending the summit said they felt the $2.4 million it cost to organize the event would have been better spent on bags of grain.

According to one official at the FAO’s sister organization, the World Food Programme (WFP), the money could have provided food for 34,500 hungry children for a year.

Developing world leaders, whose people are in the front line in the war on hunger, came to Rome in their droves, seeing the summit as a golden opportunity to air their problems. The trouble was only two Western leaders turned up to listen.

Western politicians denied they were indifferent to the plight of the hungry, but argued that the FAO’s recipe for solving the problem — spending an additional $24 billion a year on agricultural development — was out of date and unnecessary.

LOWER AMBITIONS: After the meltdown of trade talks in Seattle, which collapsed amid anti-globalization violence in 1999, international leaders have tried to straighten out the global agenda and strip it of overblown ambitions.

Critics say this agenda has been drawn up in favour of the haves, who can force the have-nots into submission by threatening to cut off the subsidies.

And even when rich countries do agree to something potentially costly, they can always wriggle out of it — as has happened with the Kyoto protocol against global warming which grew out of the historic 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Although the United States, the world’s largest polluter, originally said it would sign the pact, President George W. Bush made a dramatic U-turn on taking office, arguing that it would harm the US economy.

So why do people still bother coming to these events?—Reuters