I hope the leaders of many developing nations enjoyed their recent stay in Rome. The city is home to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and thus was the logical host for last week’s World Food Summit. Unfortunately, the meeting was a waste of time, as it was heavy on delegates from impoverished nations and short on leaders from nations with food surplus.

Considering that throughout the world nearly three times the population of the United States is chronically malnourished, the problem of world hunger is not inconsequential. We seem to forget we are in the midst of a multi-billion dollar campaign against those who chose fanaticism for want of bread.

Our closest friends and allies seemed to suffer from a similar amnesia. The only western leaders there were from Italy and Spain. The British Broadcasting Corporation reported that the schedule of the conference was tweaked to allow the Italian Prime Minister to watch the Italy-Mexico World Cup match. While some pointed fingers at questionable priorities, those defending him said that at least the prime minister attended.

For leaders like President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, whose people suffer from one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world, and President Carlos Pastrana of Colombia, whose nation is defined by fissure and rebellion, the issue of hunger is tied to the autoexacerbating cycle of poverty, disease and upheaval.

For leaders from much of sub-Saharan Africa, where non-profit groups have been whispering the word famine for months, the issue of hunger is maddeningly urgent; every day of poor harvest and bureaucratic inertia leaves hundreds more with no opportunity to reach their potential. In developing nations, human potential is the most precious resource in order to provide education, maintain health care and build infrastructure.

From a western perspective, world hunger is a difficult subject to grasp. According to the National Institute of Health, about half of adults in the United States are overweight and a quarter are obese. In the 1990s, the NIH estimates that Americans spent $33 billion annually on weight-loss products. If that amount was distributed to each of the 800 million people who are among the world’s hungry – each man, woman and child scraping by without sufficient nutrition for healthy eyes, teeth, bones and immune systems – it would amount to $41.25 per person per year. This may not sound like a lot, but considering current Iowa corn prices, it would buy every hungry person in the world over 1,100 pounds of corn each year — enough to feed themselves, trade for other foods, feed some chickens, and keep them from dipping below the 2,000 calorie per day mark.

The UN group is not asking the United States to ante up the funds it wants to combat world hunger. It is not asking the diet industry to go belly-up for the sake of those who do not have enough to eat. The group is not crusading to eliminate hunger. They are not trying to penalize nations like the America where citizens have become so addicted to food that they spend more annually on diet products than the gross domestic product of the Ukraine. The UN organization is asking the nations of the world to combine their resources to give $24 billion annually to impoverished nations to invest in agricultural development. The goal is to have only 400 million hungry people by 2015.

Unfortunately for the leaders of the developing nations who gathered in Romee, the nations able to provide the technical and economic assistance to create more sustainable agriculture, more efficient systems for food storage and distribution and more visionary policy for a globe united against food insecurity, were not interested enough to even show. We can gather for G-8 meetings and NATO powwows and even manage to show up at environmental summits, but we cannot even extend the courtesy to the scores of nations in crisis to send delegates to the World Food Summit.

Such disinterest in the persistent scourge of global hunger tacitly supports undemocratic governance in areas where scarce food is a weapon, a political tool and a bargaining chip. Our quest for freedom from fear will not be fulfilled without addressing the factors contributing to a critical shortage of food throughout the globe.

Rachel Faber Machacha is a graduate student international development studies from Emmetsburg.