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.