"In ten years, no man, woman, or child will go to bed hungry" – famous last words at the World Hunger Summit in 1974.

Today, 28 years later, 800 million are still chronically undernourished, 12 million people alone in Africa are threatened by starvation, and one in seven living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa do not have enough to eat.

A promise, made to halve world hunger by 2015 at the World Hunger Summit in 1996 has proved fruitless. Reason enough for hundreds of NGOs to organise a meeting parallel to this year’s World Hunger Summit, which begins in Rome on June 10.

The UN-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), organisors of the Rome summit, has said the world has failed to keep their promise, blaming political indifference and the wrong policies adopted by western governments to tackle the problem of global malnourishment.

Angry protests ahead of summit

Ahead of the summit some 40,000 people including Indonesian, Mexican and African farmers marched through Rome to demand that world leaders change their tactics in the war on hunger.

During the march French anti-globalisation campaigner, Jose Bove spoke out against genetically modified (GM) crops saying they solely existed to benefit multinational corporations which patent GM seeds.

Activists carried placards reading, "No to transgenic crops", "No patents on life" and "Hunger is not a problem of means, but of rights".

Help at the grass roots

Paul Nicholson, head of the association of NGOs in Rome, says "the FAO is just repeating the message that we heard five years ago – that trade and technology will solve world hunger".

The hungry ought to be able to produce their own food he says, rather than depend solely on foreign food aid, pressing for more agricultural and rural development programmes, and less market orientated measures such as trade liberalisation.

Similar to Nicholson, Germany’s chairmann of the German World Hunger Aid, Ingeborg Schäuble, accused world governments of doing little to fight world hunger at the grass roots, saying that one way to reduce poverty in developing countries was to give rural farmers greater access to essential resources such as water, seed and loans.

Speaking at a conference with Germany’s Consumer Protection Minister, Renate Künast and Development Minister Heidi Wiezoreck-Zeul, Schäuble said financial aid for farming in poverty strocken regions has decreased by two thirds in the last ten years – despite the fact that farming is still the main source of income for these countries.

Consumer protection minister Renate Künast (photo) followed Schäuble’s call for "new instruments" in the fight against worldwide hunger, saying one of the main aims at the coming summit should be "concrete steps for the development of a code for the right to nutrition"- a code with guidelines for nations, governments, companies and groups for future action.

Further action needed soon

The FAO is at current considering a proposal for a further $ 24 bilion of public investment annually on top of the current national agricultural and rural development programmes to combat hunger.

Speaking ahead of the summit, Hartwig Haen, Assistant Director-General of the FAO told Reuters that "you need to give people purchasing power to buy the food they need", he said.

However, a stronger focus on people power in countries suffering from poverty, drought and malnutrition, may just be too late: According to Jacques Graisse of the UN World Food Programme,1 2 million people in six African states are threatened with starvation. "We see this as a crisis of enormous dimensions. The situation worsens with each day", he said.

The economic benefits of halving hunger

According to the latest FAO report, the number of hungry is falling by just six million a year, less than the eight million a year stated by the UN in a 1999 report.

Consequently, the annual reduction required to reach the target by 2015 has grown from 20 to 22 million a year.

The FAO’s anti-hunger programme combines investment in farming and rural development with measures to gain access to food.

But halving hunger is not only a matter of saving lives. Brutal as it may sound, the reduction of starving and malnutrition across the globe is expected to yield econmic benefits worth at least $ 120 billion a year.