A gathering at which President Rob-ert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is able to lecture world leaders on "fast-track land acquisition" as a route to rural reform was always going to be something of a circus. The World Food Summit, convened this week in Rome by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, was meant to assess progress made since the previous summit, six years ago, which eagerly promised to halve the number of hungry people in the world by 2015. Progress has been slow. At current rates, the goal will not be reached until 2030 at the earliest. Although hunger has fallen sharply in China, it has risen in sub-Saha-ran Africa-thanks partly to AIDS, civil war and bad weather, and partly to Mr Mugabe and other pursuers of benighted policies. Getting a grasp on the size and distribution of the problem is, admittedly, tricky. Outright starvation, arising from strife or natural disaster, is a graphic affliction to which the world responds fairly swiftly. The World Food Programme, for example, delivered 2.7m tonnes of emergency food aid to 43m people last year.
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