By contrast, dozens of Presidents, Prime Ministers and even monarchs arrived from the developing world. They included Presidents Mbeki of South Africa, Obasanjo of Nigeria, Museveni of Uganda and Bouteflika of Algeria, Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, and, of course, President Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

Italian mounted police patrol the perimeter of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) headquarters on the second day of the 4-day anti-hunger FAO World Food Summit in Rome, Tuesday June 11, 2002. The summit aims to halve the number of the world's hungry by 2015. (AP Photo/Corrado Giambalvo)

A stream of limousines and police outriders escorted the leaders from the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a sprawling United Nations bureaucracy housed in the former Fascist Ministry for the African Empire near the Colosseum, to the luxury of hotels on the Via Veneto and the city’s finest restaurants.

As Jacques Diouf, the veteran Senegalese director of the (FAO), surveyed the auditorium at the start of summit, he was clearly struck not by the display of brightly colored robes and immaculate white shirts of delegates from Africa and the Third World, but by the absence of nearly all Western leaders.

Where were Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder and President Bush, one of M Diouf’s aides asked as the summit got down to discussing progress made — or rather not made — since the last one five years ago.

Then delegates committed themselves to halving the number of hungry people in the world to 400 million by 2015. In the event, only 25 million have come off the list and much of southern Africa is now being engulfed by famine.

The absence of Western leaders was “an indication of the political priority some people give to the tragedy of hunger”, MDiouf reflected. FAO officials say that 800 million people are starving, and something must be done.

They acknowledge that many Third World regimes are corrupt and that maladministration and dictatorship are as much responsible for economic backwardness and malnutrition as drought and natural disasters. But the FAO’s backers say that the organization has laudable aims and the West should help to achieve them instead of carping from the sidelines.

The FAO was founded in 1945, initially to help countries devastated by the Second World War to re-establish food supplies and later to help the newly independent countries of the Third World.

If the record is mixed, it is because the West has failed to provide the “political will”, and the funds, to back up their promises, Nick Parsons, the FAO spokesman, said. Of the $70 billion (£48billion) spent on development aid worldwide, just $11 billion goes on agriculture.

“We must mobilize political will and resources to move forward at an accelerated pace,” he said.

This week’s summit, in other words, is exposing an argument between the developed and developing world which runs rather deeper than the familiar refrain that well-intended aid merely goes into the pockets of corrupt regimes: whether there is such a thing as “the right to food” and, if so, how the world can achieve it.

Thanks to Western reservations, the draft summit declaration stops short of enshrining such a right, referring not to the “right to food” but to the need to “create the conditions” in which a “right to food” might be recognized. But the debate is under way.

Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, said progress on the 1996 goal of “cutting by half the number of hungry children, women and men by 2015” had been “far too slow”. “There is no point in making further promises today,” Mr Annan said. “We must give renewed hope to the world’s 800 million starving people through concrete action.”

The draft summit declaration notes that the average annual rate of reduction in the number of undernourished people in the world is eight million, and that the 1996 target “will not be attained”. Mr Annan said there was no shortage of food on the planet and the solution lay in helping subsistence farmers through credit, technology, healthcare, infrastructure projects and help for women in rural areas.

He called for lower barriers against food imports from developing countries, but added that “we must evaluate carefully the impact of subsidies given to producers in rich countries ... By lowering food prices in the poorest countries, they help to alleviate hunger in the short term, but dumping surpluses can have devastating long-term effects.”

In the absence of Mr Bush and Mr Blair, it was left to Ms Veneman to explain that what the West wants is “not philosophy but action”. “We reaffirm the US commitment to ending global hunger,” she said. But the US view was that an increase in agricultural production, the ending of famine and improved nutrition were all goals that could be achieved “with the help of both longstanding and new technologies, including bio-technology.

“Open markets and the free exchange of goods and services will do a far better job of getting food to people than excuses for unnecessary trade barriers can ever do,” she said. African leaders retorted that if anyone was putting up trade barriers it was the West and, as Mr Museveni put it, the main causes of hunger are “war and protectionism”.

Mr Mbeki said that Africa was faced with a “real threat of famine” because of “civil strife, migration, natural disasters, and unfair trade practices”.

That menu in full

The summit leaders dined on a feast of: