PRESIDENT Mugabe and his delegation returned home on Thursday from Rome, Italy, where they attended the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s world food security summit that saw the developing world calling for concerted efforts to end global hunger.

President Mugabe, who was accompanied by First Lady Amai Grace Mugabe and several senior Government officials, was welcomed at Harare International Airport by Vice President Joice Mujuru, Media, Information and Publicity Minister Webster Shamu, Minister of State for State Security Sydney Sekeramayi and service chiefs.

President Mugabe addressed the summit on Tuesday and called for the developed world to scrap subsidies on agriculture, which he said had led declining food production in developing countries.

He briefed the summit on the cocktail of homegrown measures Zimbabwe has taken to avert food insecurity.

The leaders, including Libya’s Brother Leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, said the West had proved it was not committed to fighting global hunger by snubbing the food summit.

The three-day summit ended on Wednesday with leaders imploring the Western world to invest more in agriculture.

It is projected that more than 9,1 billion people the world over will battle hunger by 2050.

FAO director-general, Mr Jacques Diouf, said the summit marked "an important step towards the achievement of our common objective — a world free from hunger".

He, however, said it was deplorable that although world leaders had made a declaration to fight hunger, the summit had not set any tangible targets and deadlines to spur implementation of the resolutions.

FAO had proposed setting a target of 2025 for the total eradication of hunger globally and increasing official aid to agriculture to US$44 billion per year to boost production in developing countries.

The money would have been largely invested in rural areas.

The leaders made several commitments. They affirmed a pledge to renew efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger by 2015 and eradicating hunger from the world at the earliest date.

They also pledged to improve international co-ordination and the governance of food security through a profound reform of FAO’s Committee on World Food Security, which would become a central component of the Global Partnership for Agriculture, Food Security and Nutrition.

They agreed to include stakeholders from both the public and private sectors and non-governmental organisations and elevate to ministerial level the Committee on World Food Security to enable it to co-ordinate international efforts against hunger as well as take rapid and informed decisions on global food issues.

The committee will be assisted in that task by an international high-level panel of experts. The leaders promised to reverse the downward trend in domestic and international funding for agriculture, food security and rural development in developing countries and significantly increase their share in public development aid.

herald