ROME, NOV 18 (Reuter) -- The U.N. World Food Summit ended with a strong call to do away with hunger, but with profound differences on the way to achieve that goal.
The five day summit in Rome, sponsored by the United Nations Organization for Food and Agriculture (FAO), and overshadowed by the crisis in Zaire, adopted a Statement on World Food Security and a Plan of Action.
Through the project the countries committed themselves to reduce by half by the year 2015 the 840 million undernourished people.
"We have the possibility of achieving it, we have the way to do it, we have the resources and we have shown that we are willing. We are undertaking a race against the clock, and let us go beyond the aim which we have laid out for ourselves," said the director general of FAO, Jacques Dioug, during the closing session of the summit.
The summit has shown that "We all will work hand in hand to assure ourselves that the children and babies do not cry from hunger and the mothers do not see their children without hope," the Senegalese Diouf told the delegates.
The texts of the final documents of the summit were acclaimed at the beginning of the meeting, after more than two years of negotiations, and contain compromise language in controversial areas such as commerce, development assistance, population, sanctions and women's rights.
Nonetheless, the 15 delegations expressed their reservations or interpretations of the text of the documents, including the United States, the greatest provider of food in the world.