Food Summit Ends Without Consensus on Plan of Action
ROME -- A U.N.-sponsored World Food Summit ended Thursday with calls to halt the scourge of hunger, but differences about how to go about it appeared wider than ever after four days of controversy and bickering.
The gathering, sponsored by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, committed governments to honor a 1996 pledge to halve the number of hungry people in the world by 2015.
Although about 80 world leaders attended the summit, few heads of Western powers showed up, prompting charges that leading industrialized nations were indifferent to the plight of the estimated 800 million people who suffer chronic hunger.
The World Food Summit, the first since 1996, revealed divisions about how to attack the problem of hunger pitting the North against the Southern Hemisphere, charities against governments, and some Western powers against the United Nations.
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