ROME - Thousands of protesters, including Indonesian, Mexican and African farmers, marched through Rome on the weekend 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 U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Organisers 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 the weekend of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, defying a European Union travel ban imposed on him in February before elections that were strongly criticised.
An airport official confirmed Mugabe's arrival, made possible because the summit is a U.N.-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 accuse the U.N. 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 Organisation) 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.
PEACEFUL MARCH
Rome is on alert after violence overshadowed the G8 summit of industrialised nations in the Italian port city of Genoa last year when police shot dead an anti-globalisation 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 the weekend.
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 $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 U.N. Secretary-General Kofi 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 U.N. World Food Programme says it is mobilising food aid to prevent almost 13 million people in six southern African states, including Zimbabwe, from starving to death.:
