Off The Cuff: A wry look at life

Whatever else it didn't achieve, the UN World Food Summit in Rome last month amply demonstrated that the global do-gooder has not lost its appetite for conferences.

What the summiteers did was to renew a pledge to halve world hunger by 2015 - from around 800 million to 400 million. Thanks to the UN's outreach and resources, we are served up up-to-the-minute statistics, a good part of which serves to send us to bed with a heavy heart, after a hearty dinner.

Sample statistic: one person dies of hunger every four seconds. Still, your reporter shouldn't be faulted for hoping that the UN's clinical efficiency with statistics is matched by its efforts in other areas of human development.

The old familiar refrain was not absent at this latest talkathon. While failing to resolve long-standing differences (pass me the deja vu, please) over the best route to take in dealing with the crisis, the meeting heard the FAO call for $24 billion in additional spending each year to boost agriculture.

Wealthy nations found this particular request unpalatable. The meeting also heard that governments have not displayed the political will needed to defeat hunger. One delegate among a few, who said it like it is, was Teofisto Guingona, Vice President of the Philippines. His message was simple: "We are poor, you are rich. Level the playing field."

Part of that levelling has to do with ending the massive U.S. and EU subsidies to American and Western European farmers, which distort global commodity prices. On the heels of the summit, Canada joined the subsidy bandwagon just weeks ago. Still, it should be said in Ottawa's defence that the action was a reaction to the U.S.-EU subsidy. They were levelling that particular field!

It boggles the mind to think that some of these Western subsidies are larger than a poor nation's GDP. Quite apart from the subsidies is the other deplorable reaction to overproduction: thousands of tons of food the silos can't hold going to (nourish?) the bottom of the Atlantic. Some other oceans are also occasionally treated to such preferential treatment.

As FAO chief Jacques Diouf told the summiteers, big subsidies to farmers in richer nations, at a cost of more than $1 billion a day, result in huge stocks of food in developed countries.

What will it take to make some of the nations in the G8 part with a small percentage of their milk lakes and grain mountains?

It is amazing that, even in many Third World nations, commercial considerations outweigh the moral imperative of combating hunger. Among those living in perpetual hunger, the FAO says, are 200 million children under the age of five.

They are in this pitiable situation because their parents and guardians lack the means to buy the most basic food. Of the planet's 6.2 billion people, 1.2 billion live on less than $1 (Dh 3.67) or less a day - yet another FAO statistic.

While such statistics will hopefully get a reaction from otherwise uninterested, if comfortable people, some observers of the international aid scene may want to ask the UN to be more forthcoming with a few other figures as well.

Like how much the Rome get-together cost? Whether all those delegations and UN support staff who were there, were really necessary? Whether the money saved from the summit itself could have gone towards supporting a tiny farm project in Bangladesh or Burkina Faso?

Some of us would love to read and digest a UN press release which says that, in solidarity with the starving millions, the next food parley would be held in relatively inexpensive Male. It would draw just a few dozen delegates, and the modest accommodation would be matched by a menu of rice, fish and veggies. What a departure that would be from the five star spreads in Rome!

By the way, going by the FAO's reckoning, during the 80 seconds it took you to read this piece, 20 people died of hunger worldwide....