Madam President, I wish to begin by thanking the Commissioner for his statement. However, let me say to him that I hope the outcome from Rome will be more than a statement: I hope it will be a programme of determined action. The public's perception of hunger is very often the televisual one of famine. However, over the last 25 years that has been largely identified with conflict situations, and the real problem is malnutrition. Poor water leads to disease and disability and to death and, of course, the loss of a productive workforce. That in turn leads to low-income countries, which leads to malnutrition, and that is the cycle we want to break. It is exacerbated when humanitarian aid undermines local farmers and local economies. We feel good giving our food surpluses to low-income countries, not realising that can do more harm than good to the producers of food in those countries. It is exacerbated again when we close our doors in Europe to their agricultural exports, on the perfectly understandable grounds of hygiene and food safety. There is a spiralling problem here. It means that we prevent them from earning enough to afford to meet our standards. When I was in Cape Town for the ACP, it was absurd that local producers were asking me to help them. They wanted their high-quality springbok meat to be served in Europe as in their top-quality hotels throughout Africa but, because of the rules on slicing meat, they could not afford the equipment and could not enter the market. That is the sort of thing we must guard against. To get back to the basic challenges. It is a quarter of a century since we set our targets. We said we must solve the problem and, then, in 1996, we identified 800 million people undernourished. We aimed again to halve that number by 2015: that means over 20 years, a reduction of 22 million a year. But we are reducing at 6 million a year, and five years on we are not going to meet our target. The target will not be reached until 2030. The paradox is that world food production has outpaced population growth: the 5.8 billion in the world today have, on average, 15% more food per person than the 4 billion 20 years ago. But per capita food production has not increased in the high-debt, low-income countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. That is where our attention should be focused. In 2000, out of 5.8 billion people, 826 million people were still hungry. By 2015 – our target year – 580 million will still be hungry at the present rate. I ask the Commission and all of us to remember that the United Nations Development Programme estimates that it would take just USD 13 billion a year to solve this problem. USD 13 billion a year is what we in Europe and America spend on cosmetics. I ask them to think that in the last 50 years almost 400 million worldwide have died from hunger and poor sanitation. That is three times the number of people killed in all the wars fought in the entire 20th century. Lastly, I ask you remember that every year some nine million people die from hunger. That is 24 000 deaths a day; it is one life lost every 3.6 seconds; it is 50 dead in the three minutes I have been speaking. Those are the things we should be thinking about when we are in Rome on 10 June, and that is why I ask for action and not just statements.

Political group: PPE-DE