World Food Conference Opens in Rome

Government Ministers from more than 100 countries assembled in Rome on 5 November to decide whether anything effective could be done to save about 500 million people from chronic hunger and millions from threatened starvation. The most immediate concern of the more than 1,000 delegates and as many observers, when UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim called the UN World Food Conference to order in the Palazzo dei Congressi, was the actual or threatened famine in Asia, Africa and Latin America. But looming beyond this immediate threat is the much greater challenge of chronic malnutrition that currently limits and warps the lives of an estimated 460,000,000 people and of laying the foundations for increasing food production in the developing countries to meet the needs of twice as many people by the end of the century as are alive now. The Conference secretariat, in documentation prepared for the Conference, asserts that the technical means to accomplish this exist. Their application, however, depends on the creation of the political will to mobilize the substantial resources needed from both traditional and new sources of world wealth. The World Food Conference has been called by the UN General Assembly in Resolution 3180 (XXVIII) of 17 December 1973, to meet in Rome, Italy, 5-16 November, under the auspices of the UN and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
A general view of the Conference Room at the Palazzo dei Congressi during statement being made by President Luis Echeverría Álvarez of Mexico.