Summit supports halving of number of hungry by 2015

Heads of state and other officials from more than 180 nations, meeting in Rome last week, have reiterated their plan to halve the number of the world's hungry from 800 million to 400 million by 2015 in an attempt to raise more funds for the initiative first mooted five years ago.

But the meeting was dubbed “the summit of the poor” by Dr Jacques Diouf, the director general of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation (which organised the summit) because so few Western leaders attended.

The only two representatives from the 29 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) were Italy's prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, hosting the summit, and Spain's Jose Maria Aznar, obliged to attend because Spain holds the European Union's rotating …