World's poor countries want greater access to markets

ROME -- Led by Cuba, developing countries on Tuesday demanded greater access to international markets and an end to export subsidies, saying fairer free trade was the only way to end world hunger.

On the second day of the U.N. World Food Summit, leaders of the world's poorest countries called on the United States, European Union and other exporting nations to give poor farmers a competing chance to sell their wares.

"We are poor. You are rich. Level the playing field!" Teofisto Guingona, foreign minister of the Philippines, said.

"Do not in the name of free trade deny us time to integrate our resources, and having integrated them deny us access to your rich markets."

Many poor countries say the current international trade framework leaves farmers in the developing world unable to compete with subsidized crops from richer countries.

Free markets

The issue of freer markets has dominated the four-day summit, designed to accelerate efforts to meet U.N. targets of reducing the number of the world's hungry from 800 million to 400 million by 2015.

Leaders adopted a resolution Monday promising to work harder to meet the goal -- and to develop in two years a voluntary set of guidelines recognizing the right to food for the world's 6 billion people.

The United States, which opposed recognition of that right in the past, may register a reservation to the final document or may not sign, human rights groups say.

The European Union pushed for the summit to consider food a human right. Several EU leaders also acknowledged that high export subsidies -- among them in the EU -- were part of the world's hunger problem.

Italy's agriculture minister, Gianni Alemanno, said the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, which is hosting the summit, should play a balancing role to the World Trade Organization.

"FAO must be strong and credible ... to avoid that the processes of globalization be dominated only by a purely commercial logic devoid of an ethic of solidarity," he said.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque went further, saying hunger would never end as long as wealthy countries controlled an economic system that he alleged deprives 800 million people of their daily bread.

Perez Roque didn't mention the United States specifically, directing his comments more to wealthy countries in general and the plight of the world's poor.

In an interview with Associated Press Television News, however, he said recent allegations by U.S. officials that Cuba was trying to develop biological weapons were an excuse to justify a hardening of the U.S. embargo on the island.