The world, it seems, is down on its luck.

As the global food crisis threatens to get worse and the price of oil soars almost daily, leaders haggled on Thursday over the wording of a document proposing actions to deal with hunger. According to media reports, the just-concluded World Food Security Summit in Rome almost collapsed and ended contentiously with leaders from this part of the world protesting that not much had been accomplished and that the agreement reached would not fully address the problem.

The three-day summit was called by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation as an emergency response to high food prices that officials said could threaten nearly one billion people with starvation. However, even before the recent food price spikes, there were already an estimated one billion people suffering from chronic hunger; another two billion experiencing malnutrition and some 18,000 children dying daily as a direct or indirect consequence of hunger……