Ministers and leaders from around a hundred countries met on Monday in Madrid at a UN conference aimed at outlining future actions to combat the global food crisis, which is exacerbated by poor economic conditions, agencies report.
Little progress has been made in the ongoing fight against hunger, said Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos at the opening of the meeting, attributing the problems to rising food prices in 2008 and the international financial crisis. The conference is intended to encourage a "drastic change in addressing hunger issues," said Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in an interview with the newspaper El Pais. The meeting, attended by UN officials, representatives of international agencies, and civil society, will be closed on Tuesday by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.
The meeting in Madrid is a "chance to make concrete decisions" following last year’s promises from the FAO conference in Rome, emphasized Diouf. FAO member countries committed at the Rome meeting in June 2008 to halve the number of hungry people in the world by 2015, but their promises have been accompanied by only limited financial support. Today, there are about 960 million malnourished people in the world, and more than 100,000 people die from hunger every day, according to UN data. The meeting will conclude with the "Madrid Declaration," which will outline guidelines for future action. The final document will be presented by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. "In recent decades, it has often been forgotten that it is just a step from an abundance of cheap food to a critical shortage that leads to hunger," the two leaders stated in a comment published on Monday by the International Herald Tribune. (H)
