Spooked by G-8 Violence, Rome Rejects Role of Host

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, fearful of street violence, has withdrawn Rome’s commitment to host a long-planned conference on global hunger but has promised to find a suitable, more isolated venue elsewhere in Italy.

Jacques Diouf, director general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, agreed Monday over lunch with Berlusconi to consider other sites for the November meeting, ending a public dispute between the Italian leader and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Annan had insisted Thursday that Italy was obliged by treaty to allow the Rome-based FAO to hold the World Food Summit at its headquarters near the Colosseum. The U.N. called the meeting more than a year ago and expects about 7,000 delegates from more than 150 countries, including many heads of state.

But Berlusconi, whose center-right government is still under fire for the mob violence and police brutality during protests at July’s Group of 8 summit in Genoa, said Friday that he “cannot expose sacred Rome to similar risks.”

Activists espousing a wide range of humanitarian and environmental causes have besieged many international conferences since 1999, starting with that year’s riot-marred World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, and some have been planning to gather here during the FAO meeting.

To keep protesters at bay, the WTO will hold its meeting this fall in the isolated Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar and the Group of 8 will retreat next summer to a national park in the Canadian Rockies. The annual World Bank and International Monetary Fund meeting scheduled this month in Washington, D.C., has been cut from one week to two days and will be held under extraordinary police protection.

In Genoa, two days of rioting by small groups of anarchists drew police into clashes with 100,000 mostly peaceful protesters, causing $20 million in property damage and leaving one demonstrator dead and 279 under arrest. Berlusconi has charged that Italy is the target of an international movement dedicated to fighting his government.

After meeting with Annan over the weekend in South Africa, Italian Foreign Minister Renato Ruggiero said the U.N. leader had softened his position and now “understands” Berlusconi’s fears.

“The FAO is not equipped to evaluate risks of demonstrations and violent acts,” Diouf told reporters after his lunch with Berlusconi. “We are specialized in agriculture, not security. If the host government raises the [security] issue, we have to take their concerns into consideration.”

Italy had suggested transferring the food summit to Africa. But the FAO chief, who is from Senegal, said such a move would delay the meeting and ruled out the suggestion. Instead, a panel representing the FAO and Italy’s Foreign Ministry and police forces will propose new sites in Italy. The FAO will have the final word, Diouf said, and Italy must bear the cost of moving the summit.

Mayors of several remote Italian settlements, including the Alpine village of St. Vincent and the Mediterranean island of Pantelleria, have offered to host the five-day summit, which is to start Nov. 5. A police officers union in Calabria has extolled the security of the southern region’s mountains.

Italian officials said the most likely venue is Fiuggi, a medieval spa town 40 miles southeast of Rome whose warm spring waters have for more than 700 years drawn visitors seeking relief from kidney stones, urinary infections and gout.

“The FAO summit does not scare us,” Fiuggi’s mayor, Virginio Bonanni, told the Italian news agency ANSA, noting that police can easily control the three winding roads that ascend to the hill town. “The protesters couldn’t do much in Fiuggi.”

Berlusconi’s critics say that his fear of protests is overblown and that moving the meeting will isolate world leaders from grass-roots activists who share the FAO’s goal of improving the inadequate diets of 800 million people worldwide.

The Genoa Social Forum, which coordinated the demonstrations in Genoa and grew into an Italy-wide movement, said it had been expecting no more than 5,000 environmentalists, farm union leaders and other activists to gather in Rome during the food summit.

The activists were planning a parallel “summit” on food issues, but some of their leaders had also been invited to the FAO summit for discussions with government officials and international lending agencies. Many environmentalists oppose the use of genetically modified crops, which the FAO endorses.

But the intensity of their criticism does not come close to the anger focused in Genoa against the leaders of the world’s richest industrial democracies, who were accused of ignoring the poor.

“We have a lot of things to propose to the FAO,” said Vittorio Agnoletto, a spokesman for the Genoa Social Forum. “But we are not against the FAO.”

Speaking to reporters at his headquarters, Diouf seemed to relish the controversy. The aim of the summit, he said, is to reverse a decline in political and financial support for the FAO’s 5-year-old campaign to cut in half by 2015 the number of undernourished people.

“For all these arguments over the past month, about this change of venue, I would like to say I am very grateful,” the FAO chief commented, grinning broadly. “Now people in every country know that there will be a summit to talk about the problems of hunger.”