Thousands march in Rome for change in hunger relief

Thousands march in Rome for change in hunger relief

Stephanie Holmes and David Brough
Reuters
Rome

Thousands of protesters, including Indonesian, Mexican and
African farmers, marched through Rome on Saturday before an
international food summit to demand that world leaders change
their tactics in the war on hunger.

The protesters, calling for self-sufficiency in food
production and a ban on genetically modified (GM) crops, wanted
their message to be heard at the four-day food summit hosted by
the Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Organizers said some 40,000 people from Africa, Europe, Asia
and Latin America marched across the city chanting and bearing
banners with the slogan "Hunger - a problem of rights, not
means". Police put the number at 10,000.

The runup to the summit's opening on Monday was further
complicated by the arrival on Saturday of Zimbabwean President
Robert Mugabe, defying a European Union travel ban imposed on him
in February before elections that were strongly criticized.

An airport official confirmed Mugabe's arrival, made possible
because the summit is a UN-sponsored event.

Millions of Zimbabweans are desperately hungry because of a
prolonged drought, economic crisis and the seizure of white-owned
farms by government-backed militants.

The FAO meeting is aimed at reviving the global political will
to achieve a goal of halving world hunger by 2015. But protesters
like rebel French farmer Jose Bove accused the UN and world
leaders of putting trade above agriculture.

"It is not a problem of quantity of food, it's an economic and
political problem," said Bove, sporting his trademark pipe and
handlebar moustache.

Msnab Bozu, a 52-year-old farmer from Calcutta, agreed: "We
are here to tell the FAO to get the WTO (World Trade
Organization) out of agricultural politics."

One protester wore a sandwich board showing a strawberry
mutating into a fish to express his distrust of GM crops,
expected to be one of the most controversial summit issues.

Rome is on alert after violence overshadowed the G-8 summit of
industrialized nations in the Italian port city of Genoa last
year when police shot dead an anti-globalization protester.

More than 5,000 police will guarantee security during next
week's summit. A strong police presence watched as the
demonstrators passed by peacefully on Saturday.

Don Giuseppe, whose parish church stands on the square where
the march began, said he was happy to leave the doors open.
"These children have flags of peace, I cannot see why there would
be violence," he said.

The FAO says countries are considering a new proposal to
provide a further US$24 billion on top of current investments to
meet the 1996 pledge to halve the number of hungry people to
around 400 million by 2015.

Leaders including UN Secretary-General Kofi A. Annan, Spanish
Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and the presidents of Nigeria,
South Africa and Indonesia, were expected to fly into Rome for
the conference.

The UN World Food Program says it is mobilizing food aid to
prevent almost 13 million people in six southern African states,
including Zimbabwe, from starving to death.

Meanwhile, French anti-globalization campaigner Jose Bove said
that genetically modified (GM) crops are no cure for world hunger
but solely exist to benefit multinational corporations which
patent GM seeds.

"It is just that big multinationals want to control all the
rights to seeds. With their patents on GM seeds, they can impose
on the global farming community the seeds that they sell," added
Bove, who shot to world fame when he ransacked a McDonald's site
in France in 1999 to protest against U.S. tariffs.