2002-06-12 11:19:47 GMT (Reuters)

By Luke Baker

ROME, June 12 (Reuters) - South African President Thabo Mbeki has accused world leaders of not caring about human life and said their failure to attend a World Food Summit this week was undermining the fight to save millions of starving people.

Mbeki, who succeeded Nelson Mandela as head of Africa's economic powerhouse in 1999, said the fact that only two major Western powers sent top delegations to Rome showed that the developed world's priorities were "fundamentally wrong".

"The entire leadership of Western Europe and North America was here in Rome two weeks ago to discuss NATO. They all came without exception, but they don't come now," Mbeki told Reuters in an interview.

"I suppose that's because they don't think the problem of 800 million people going hungry in the world is important.

"I think that shows insufficient concern about human life, really and truly," he said late on Tuesday.

The U.N.-organised summit was called to urge governments to honour a 1996 pledge to halve world hunger by 2015. While dozens of developing world leaders have poured into Rome for the June 10-13 event, most wealthy nations sent agriculture ministers.

Only Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar of Spain and Italy's Silvio Berlusconi came to the meeting.

Clare Short, Britain's International Development Secretary, slammed the gathering as a waste of time and was witheringly critical of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), saying it was old-fashioned and in need of improvement.

Short said in a BBC on interview on Tuesday that if the U.N. body improved food management in developing nations the hunger problem would ease, arguing that many hungry people lived in countries that had enough food to feed all their population.

But with nearly 13 million people threatened with famine in in Southern Africa alone, Mbeki defended the summit and said those who criticised from afar were part of the problem.

"I think it would have succeeded better if the leadership of the developed world had attended. But you can't say it is a waste of time. Those who stay away and then say it was a failure, I think they are wrong.

"It is surely fundamentally wrong that the whole leadership of the developed world doesn't think that this matter of hunger in the world is sufficiently important," he said.

"I wouldn't mind if they disrespected us if they also responded to the millions of people who are hungry."

He said the developed world's tendency to respond to food shortages only when the situation had blown up into an emergency also showed a degree of callousness.

"This idea of only responding when an emergency has been declared...it is like saying that when people are hungry as a routine daily matter, that is okay. That can't be right, surely that can't be right?" he said.


AFRICAN REGENERATION

As well as attending the Food Summit, Mbeki and 14 other African heads of state met in Rome to flesh out final details of an African initiative to revitalise the continent, which for so long has been retarded by war, famine and disease.

The plan, dubbed the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), is to be presented to leaders of the Group of Eight most-industrialised nations at a summit in Canada later this month, when Mbeki expects to get a positive response.

But he said he also hoped to have constructive discussions with G8 leaders, particularly U.S. President George W. Bush, over the issue of agricultural subsidies in the developed world, which he said were keeping Africa suppressed and uncompetitive.

"The whole issue of subsidisation of agriculture in the OECD countries is wrong, it's incorrect," said Mbeki, referring to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which groups 29 of the world's largest economies.

"What they do impacts negatively on people who are just surviving, just trying to live. It's wrong, whoever does it."

The United States has come under fire from all sides at the Food Summit for its new, heavily subsidised farm bill, which even its neighbour and largest trading partner Canada said was creating distortions in world agricultural trade and prices.

Mbeki drew back from making any direct link between the subsidisation of agriculture in the northern hemisphere and food shortages in southern Africa, but said the developed world was suffocating Africa's chances of providing for itself.

"They are killing the potential for development and keeping everybody at a subsistence level," he said. "It's very destructive and costly for everybody, including those who are providing the billions of dollars in subsidies."