Rimini new destination for food summit - Italians reticient

The United Nations food body has accepted an Italian proposal to move a planned world food summit from Rome to Rimini, but officials are still haggling over costs, sources familiar with the event said on Wednesday. "FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf has told member states that the majority of the council have accepted to move the summit to Rimini,"​ one source told Reuters. Sources said earlier Italian authorities had set a ceiling on their payment that was far short of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation's estimates for the cost of the event. They gave no figures but said Italy appeared to be blocking plans for the summit."The Italians have set a budget ceiling which is a long way below our estimate,"​ one source told Reuters. Officials were scrambling to plug the gap. With barely a month to go before the November 5-9 meeting, which is expected to attract heads of state from around the world, one source said the more Italian authorities complicated plans, the less the likelihood of the summit happening. Other sources said the confusion and delay only served to worsen the plight of those whom the summit intended to help - the world's hungry. A letter from the Italian government to FAO, made available to Reuters, pledged that the government would pay the extra costs involved in moving the event to the Adriatic resort of Rimini from FAO headquarters in Rome. "The Italian government will continue to provide FAO with all the necessary support for the success of the meeting,"​ said the letter from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's office, dated September 22 and addressed to Diouf. "This will include covering the costs that FAO and member states could incur as a result of conducting the conference away from FAO's Rome headquarters,"​ the letter continued. The sources did not say why Italy might be blocking the summit, but Berlusconi made it clear during the summer that he wanted the meeting cancelled or delayed after anti-globalisation protesters ran riot at July's Group of Eight summit in Genoa. As a compromise solution, the government eventually suggested shifting the conference from Rome to Rimini, saying the popular resort would be easier to protect. Security fears have intensified since the September 11 attacks against the United States, contributing to the postponement of an October Commonwealth summit and a meeting on genetically modified foods in Cairo, as well as other events. Last month the mayor of Rimini, Alberto Ravaioli, urged a swift decision on the venue as time was fast running out to make adequate preparations. The summit, called "World Food Summit - five years later", aims to raise both the political will and the financial resources to achieve a goal set in 1996 to halve the number of hungry people - still more than 800 million - by 2015. Recent data indicated that the number of hungry people in the world was declining by only eight million a year and not by the 20 million needed to meet the U.N. target.