The UN Must Die a Bureaucratic Death.

This to be my column to vent disgust with the UN. I’m going to be selective because to be honest, it would take a full-time job to catalogue all of the criminal activity in the UN.

Today’s update, Nov 18, 2008 is a particularly disgusting display of the UN’s lack of context.  UN reps ought to have family living as “normal people” in the countries that they hail from.  Might give them a bit more perspective.

Nov 18, 2008

Millions are starving, but this is ok…

U.N. Human Rights Council Spends Foreign Aid Money on $23 Million Ceiling

Tuesday , November 18, 2008

The U.N. Human Rights Council, frequently accused of coddling some of the world’s most repressive governments, threw itself a party in Geneva Tuesday that featured the unveiling of a $23 million mural paid for in part with foreign aid funds.

In a ceremony attended by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Spanish artist Miquel Barcelo told the press that his 16,000-square-foot ceiling artwork reminded him of “an image of the world dripping toward the sky” — but it reminded critics of money slipping out of relief coffers.

“In Spain there’s a controversy because they took money out of the foreign aid budget — took money from starving children in Africa — and spent it on colorful stalactites,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of U.N. Watch.

Click here to see photos of the $23 million ceiling art.

Spanish taxpayers paid for most of the sprawling sculpture, which has been compared to the Sistine Chapel, but around $633,000 came from Spain’s budget for overseas development aid.

Spain’s conservative opposition party blasted the government for diverting money from projects to alleviate poverty in poorer countries, though the government insisted the funding for Barcelo’s work was kept separate.

Ban himself praised the piece and thanked Barcelo for putting his “unique talents to work in the service of the world.” The artwork will soar above the Human Rights Council’s chambers at U.N.’s European headquarters in Geneva, which may soon undergo a $1 billion renovation — but only after a $1.9 billion facelift of the U.N.’s New York offices is completed.

Meanwhile, international humanitarian groups pleaded with the human rights panel to take time out from their party to address the worsening human rights “catastrophe” in the Congo, where the government is fighting a deadly battle with several rebel groups.

“Mass displacement, killings and sexual violence — involving hundreds of thousands of victims, if not more — require an urgent response,” according to a statement issued jointly Tuesday by Freedom House and U.N. Watch.

Congo has been off the radar at the Human Rights Council, which removed its monitor from the African country in March when the Congolese government and a group of neighboring nations applied pressure on the council to expel the monitor.

“When the Human Rights Council was established two years ago there were about 12 or so monitors, and gradually one after another has been scrapped,” said Neuer. “The other ones are all on the chopping block.”

Violence is worsening in the country, where an estimated 4 million people have been killed in the past 10 years and tens of thousands have been displaced in recent months.

“The [Lord's Resistance Army] leader, Joseph Kony, is continuing his brutal and abusive tactics,” said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The U.S. and U.K., along with the U.N. and governments in the region, should actively work together to apprehend LRA leaders wanted by the [International Criminal Court].”

Secretary-General Ban has supported a U.N. resolution that would increase the U.N. peacekeeping force in Congo by 3,100 troops and police, but some critics say that move would not be enough.

Human rights groups — and U.N. officials themselves — have criticized the peacekeeping force for failing to protect civilians in places like Kiwanja, where at least 20 people were killed this week.

The 17,000-man U.N. deployment is already the U.N.’s largest peacekeeping commitment, but is restricted by tough rules of engagement and has a massive territory to cover. Congo is the size of Western Europe, and North Kivu, where the fighting is centered, is one-and-a-half times the size of France.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

June 21, 2008

‘Ball of fire’ if Iran attacked: IAEA chief

Jun 21 10:08 AM US/Eastern

The UN atomic watchdog chief warned on Saturday that an attack on Iran over its controversial nuclear programme would turn the region into a fireball, as Tehran rejected an Israeli strike as “impossible.”

Mohamed ElBaradei also warned that he would not be able to continue in his role as International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general should the Islamic republic be attacked.

His stark comments came as Iran stressed yet again that it will not negotiate with world powers over its nuclear programme if it is required to suspend its controversial uranium enrichment.

“A military strike (against Iran) would in my opinion be worse than anything else … It would transform the Middle East region into a ball of fire,” ElBaradei said in an interview with Al-Arabiya television.

A report by the New York Times on Friday cited US officials as saying a major Israeli military exercise earlier this month seemed to be a practice for any potential strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

In Athens, an official with the Greek air force’s central command confirmed the substance of the US media report, stating that it had taken part in “joint training exercises” with Israel off the Mediterranean island of Crete.

The manoeuvres, code-named “Glorious Spartan 08,” took place on May 28 and June 12, and consisted of aerial exercises and knowledge exchange, said the Greek source, who requested anonymity.

The goal was for more than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighter jets to prepare for long-range strikes and demonstrate Israel’s serious concern over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Times reported.

But ElBaradei said any attack would simply harden Iran’s position in its row with the West over its nuclear programme.

“A military strike would spark the launch of an emergency programme to make atomic weapons, with the support of all Iranians, including those living abroad,” he said.

He did not believe that there was an “imminent risk” of proliferation given the current status of Iran’s nuclear programme and made it clear he would “not have a place” as IAEA head in the event of a military strike.

The West fears that Tehran could use uranium enrichment to make an atomic bomb although Tehran insists it only wants nuclear technology for peaceful energy purposes.

ElBaradei’s comments come as Iran stressed on Saturday it will not negotiate with world powers over its nuclear programme if it is required to suspend its enrichment activities.

“Suspending uranium enrichment has no logic behind it and it is not acceptable and the continuation of negotiation will not be based on suspension,” Iranian government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham told reporters.

He responded to talk of a military strike by saying “such impudence and audacity to have an aggression against our national interest and integrity is an impossible action.”

For his part, Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, said Tehran would “continue uranium enrichment non-stop since this activity is under the 24 hour surveillance (of IAEA cameras).

“The request to stop uranium enrichment is an old issue and does not have any legal or technical foundation,” he added.

In Jerusalem, the Israeli parliament foreign affairs and defence commission chairman Tsahi Hanegbi said Saturday that Western diplomatic efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear programme had failed.

“Next year and the year after that will be crucial. The world must must decide if it gives more time to diplomatic efforts, which currently do not seem very promising,” he told Israeli public radio.

“Western measures against Iran’s nuclear programme have failed.”

On June 6 an Israeli Deputy Prime Minister, Shaul Mofaz, warned that Iran would face attack if it pursues what he said was its nuclear weapons programme.

A week ago, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana presented a new offer to Mottaki on ending the six-year standoff over Iran’s nuclear drive, offering economic and trade incentives. Iran is still considering the plan.

It was made on behalf of Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States.

June 11, 2008

Report Shows U.N. Development Program Violated U.N. Law, Routinely Passed on Millions to North Korean Regime

Wednesday, June 11, 2008
By George Russell

NEWS ANALYSIS —

After more than two years of accusations and probes into the operations of the United Nations Development Program in North Korea, a weighty report finally reveals how routinely, and systematically, the agency disregarded U.N. regulations on how it conducted itself in Kim Jong-Il’s brutal dictatorship, passing on millions of dollars to the regime in the process.

The 353-page report, by a three-member “External Independent Investigative Review Panel” appointed by UNDP to investigate itself, was published with much fanfare last week after nine months of political maneuvering and research.

eiirp_final_report_31-may (2.2MB)

The report depicts an organization that for years apparently considered itself immune from its own rules of procedure as well as the laws and regulations of countries that were trying to keep weapons of mass destruction out of Kim’s hands.

It also shows that UNDP apparently considered itself above the decisions of the United Nations Security Council, itself, when that organization tried — as it is still trying — to bar Kim from gaining the means to create more weapons of mass destruction.

That is the same Security Council whose decisions, U.N. officials argue, have the weight of international law when applied to the United States and the rest of the world.

Yet despite those rules, and in the midst of a growing international storm of concern over Kim’s behavior, UNDP’s North Korea office, as well as other UNDP offices, continued to hand over millions in hard currency to the Kim regime and to transfer sensitive equipment with potential for terrorist use or for use in creating weapons of mass destruction.

“What this report shows is that UNDP has operated lawlessly for far too long,” said Mark Wallace, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who brought many of the original accusations against the U.N. anti-poverty agency to light in January 2006 after examining confidential UNDP internal audits of its North Korean operation.

“U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has indicated that integrity is a high U.N. priority,” Wallace said. “It is now up to UNDP to follow that direction.”

The latest panel report initially was passed on to reporters on June 2 by UNDP boss Kemal Dervis at an unusual press conference where he hailed the report’s conclusions, saying that “we finally have some closure on the allegations made against UNDP.”

The actual authors of the report were not available for questioning or comment, Dervis said, until they presented the document to a meeting of UNDP’s supervisory executive board in Geneva. The meeting begins June 16.

But a close reading of the long and dense document, replete with mind-numbing footnotes, shows that Dervis is wrong.

Among other things, the report confirms that UNDP hired North Korean government employees to fill sensitive core staff posts, in violation of its own regulations, and that the Kim regime picked the staffers.

Previously this had been revealed by a report done by the United Nations Board of Auditors in May 2007 in the wake of Wallace’s concern. The 2007 report noted that the same violations had been reported in internal UNDP audits going back to 2001.

The UNDP office in North Korea paid the salaries of these staff directly to the government in hard currency — another forbidden practice. The report dryly notes, in a footnote on page 96, “It was not clear how much of these amounts were paid to the National Staff, if any.”

In an effort that may have been aimed at keeping at least some staffers from starving, UNDP gave them all hard-currency supplements in cash — another violation of its own rules.

The regime employees filled such critical jobs as UNDP finance officer; program officer slots that helped to design and oversee UNDP projects in the country; technology officer, who maintained all of UNDP’s internal and external communications and servers; and even the assistant to the head of the UNDP office, who presumably was in a position to see much, if not all, of the boss’ paperwork.

Those violations already were known, although only in the barest detail. But the latest report reveals a fact that makes matters much worse: The regime-appointed finance officer — the person who wrote UNDP’s checks for 10 years — also was responsible for reconciling UNDP’s bank statements with the checkbook.

These two functions are supposed to be separated as protection against fraud. The importance of that separation is strongly underlined in UNDP’s basic guidelines called the “Internal Control Framework for UNDP Offices.”

The potential for fraud by a North Korean government employee, however, is discussed in the report only in dry bureaucratic language.

Despite that the review panel brought documents showing millions of UNDP financial transactions out of North Korea, the report shows — in a footnote buried on page 53 — that the panelists never saw any of some roughly $16.6 million worth of cancelled checks that were signed by UNDP. The reason: Kim’s bankers won’t release the originals or copies.

Without the checks, it is impossible to see if the finance officer made them out to cash or if the names on them match UNDP payment records and bank statements.

The North Korean regime also refused to let the panelists interview the finance officer.

The potential fraud risks are huge. The report notes that in 78 percent of a transaction sample of UNDP payment records that they reviewed, the signature on payment receipts could not be verified. For all the rest there was no sign of a receipt at all.

The report declares, with great understatement, that “it is difficult to determine the ultimate beneficiaries of payments made by UNDP-DPRK on behalf of itself.”

The panel sharply hikes — by millions of dollars — the amount of hard currency that previous probes indicated UNDP had passed on to the nuclear-arming Kim regime from 1997 to 2007, as Kim was ramping up his nuclear weapons program and ultimately setting off a nuclear explosion.

Hard currency transfers to Kim of any kind supposedly were forbidden, but the 2007 investigation already had shown that the rule was violated not only by UNDP but other U.N. agencies in the country.

The latest report says that UNDP spent $23.8 million on behalf of itself and other U.N. entities in North Korea, almost all in hard currency that never was supposed to reach Kim. The panel estimates that 38 percent of this, or $9.12 million, went directly to the North Korean government.

But that is not all. The report also notes for the first time that other UNDP offices and agencies outside the country chipped in anywhere from $9.5 million to $27.4 million more in hard currency to the Kim regime over the same period, on behalf of the North Korean office.

Using the 38 percent yardstick that the panel applied to in-country spending, anywhere from $3.6 million to $10.4 million of those totals might have been directly passed on to the government.

In addition, the report makes passing mention of an even bigger flood of cash: $381 million that flowed into North Korea from non-U.N. donors through an arrangement called the Agriculture Recovery and Environmental Protection, or AREP, Cooperation Framework. UNDP projects in North Korea formed part of that framework and, more importantly, helped to support the entire arrangement. But the report goes no further in tracing those funds.

Unauthorized hard currency by no means was the only support UNDP was offering Kim. The report greatly raises the number of sensitive “dual use” items — good for civilian use and for terrorist purposes or helping to create weapons of mass destruction — that UNDP handed over to North Korea. These included computers, software, satellite-receiving equipment, spectrometers and other sensitive measuring devices: 95 items in all.

(In April 2007 UNDP spokesman David Morrison, in reply to questions about the nature of dual use items in North Korea, told journalists that “there have been some rice husk-removers transferred and a plotter to help the DPRK authorities more accurately produce maps for environmental monitoring.”)

The policy of unquestioned transfer of dual use items continued even as the Kim regime in 2006 conducted ballistic missile tests and exploded a low-yield nuclear device to the outrage and dismay of the rest of the world; moreover, UNDP acquired at least some of the items in misleading fashion.

The report notes that when some items were purchased, “it was not explicitly stated … that the equipment would be utilized by DPRK nationals working under the auspices of UNDP projects in DPRK.”

In at least one instance, the report says, an employee with a UNDP sister agency even supplied false information to a Dutch manufacturer nervous about end-users in North Korea, telling him that the equipment would be used by the UNDP office in Pyongyang when it really was intended for a faraway rural location.

The report also shows that UNDP, itself, rarely asked its suppliers about any possible limits on the use of sensitive export goods and, even when it was explicitly informed, made little, if any, effort to keep records of dual use limitations on equipment.

(The report does not say so, but with North Korean government employees operating as program officers, the lack of conscientious record keeping might not come as much of a surprise.)

The report then dismisses any notion of holding anyone at UNDP accountable for these spectacular lapses by invoking a concept of blanket immunity.

UNDP and its officials, the report notes, are immune from the enforcement of U.S. and other national export control laws imposed for anti-terrorist or national security reasons, under an international U.N. Convention on Privileges and Immunities.

The document notes that despite that free pass, a U.N. legal opinion has held that the world organization can be bound by at least some export license limitations when it is retransferring those sensitive goods.

But the people really exposed to penalties for most of the transfers are UNDP vendors who supplied the goods, because they lack U.N. immunity. The panel notes that in many cases, lack of knowledge of the true use of the equipment is not considered a legal defense by many nations, including the U.S.

Having said that, the report tries to sweep under the rug the explosive topic of UNDP’s obligations to the U.N., itself, when the U.N.’s chief executive body, the Security Council, calls — as it did twice in 2006 — for bans of sensitive technologies to Kim. Those bans are known as U.N. Resolution 1695, passed on April 15, 2006, after Kim sent test ballistic missiles in the direction of Japan; and Resolution 1718, passed on Oct. 14, 2006, five days after Kim’s low-yield nuclear blast.

Resolution 1695 applied to equipment that might be used in Kim’s ballistic missile program. Resolution 1718, however, was much more sweeping and called for bans on any equipment that might be used in any kind of weapons of mass destruction, as well as travel bans for officials associated with the weapons program.

The panel report tries to take as little note of these sanctions as possible. Resolution 1718, for example, is mentioned in a footnote on page 195 of the report. The footnote calls its applicability to UNDP programs “relatively minimal,” and adds, “a significant majority of the equipment bought in connection with the UNDP-DPRK program was purchased before the passage of this resolution such that [it] was inapplicable.”

Since the report also notes that the records were badly kept or non-existent, this is a hard assertion to contradict. But it is a highly questionable assumption, at best. The report earlier notes that any UNDP-purchased equipment in North Korea belonged to UNDP until it was officially transferred to a host government. That happened to all the items of dual use equipment in North Korea at the same time — in March 2007.

At that time, UNDP shut down its programs after the hue and cry over UNDP practices in North Korea caused the agency to amend some of its practices — changes that the regime refused to accept.

UNDP officials have argued, and the report tacitly echoes their view, that the transfer of equipment when agency projects are closed down is normal practice.

Hardly normal are Security Council calls for the world, presumably including the council, itself, to stop transfers of exactly the kinds of equipment UNDP gave to Kim. There is no sign, for example, that the agency gave any thought to finding another method of asserting its property rights until the sanctions were lifted or of asking other U.N. agencies in North Korea to try to keep tabs on the gear.

UNDP “normal practice” apparently trumped world peace and security. The report passes over that complication, involving a rogue regime that had conducted illegal atomic blasts, and that the U.N., itself, had declared an outlaw, without comment.

With the same effect of sheltering UNDP from charges that it aided in endangering the peace and security of the world, the panel report declares that any charges that UNDP inadequately supervised the projects in North Korea under its care are untenable.

It based that conclusion on voluminous paperwork provided by UNDP that proved, the panelists said, that site visits to the project took place frequently and were unimpeded.

But the report fails to put those inspections in the context of the fact that four of UNDP’s program and liaison officers, who manage and help to create programs and perform liaison with institutions and vendors involved in the projects — also were North Korean government employees.

(The report is equally silent on the role of the Kim regime employee who served as UNDP technology officer, who was in charge of all of the UNDP offices’ internal and external communications and its computer servers. UNDP communications and computers are supposed to be sacrosanct in terms of host country snooping. Instead, in North Korea, the potential snoops were in charge of the equipment. The potential implications of that fact are completely unexplored.)

Overall, one of the most striking aspects of the report is its lack of curiosity about whether individual members of the UNDP staff should be held accountable for egregious, longstanding and dangerous violations of UNDP rules and international law, not to mention common sense.

This applied notably to the presence in UNDP’s North Korean safe for more than a decade of $3,500 in defaced U.S. counterfeit $100 bills — “Super-Note” fakes that the Kim regime famously passed around the world. Possession of counterfeit U.S. bills is a crime. Even given U.N. legal immunities, it might seem an important matter to bring to the attention of one of the organization’s biggest donors.

Yet no-one informed U.S. authorities and senior UNDP officials claimed no knowledge of the fake funds, even though the bogus money was listed on annual reports of the safe contents for years.

The report’s assessment: “There is no evidence that anyone acted in bad faith or in a fraudulent or deceptive manner. Instead, the Panel finds that there was a clear lack of attentiveness at the [office] and Headquarters levels and that communications between the Country Office and UNDP headquarters were inadequate.

“Inadequate communications” is the explanation often given in the report for failures that allowed rule-breaking to continue, even as Kim openly brandished his nuclear weapon. The report notes that in August 2006 — four months after the passage of U.N. sanctions Resolution 1695 — the UNDP office in North Korea asked headquarters for guidance on dual use equipment transmissions to North Korea. It never got any. The project, which was based in part on receiving satellite imagery, had equipment that the report says already had been purchased.

Then, on Oct. 11, 2006 — two days after the Korean nuclear blast — a UNDP regional supervisor in Thailand answered the guidance request. He ordered UNDP not to purchase any equipment and “to close down the project immediately.” In the same message, according to the panel, the supervisor, Romulo Garcia, said he had received clearance from his bosses to close down the project in late 2005.

As it happens, U.N. Resolution 1718, imposing more drastic sanctions on North Korea, went into effect three days after Garcia’s sudden desire to follow up on a two-month-old guidance request.

The panel report’s conclusion? The 2005 decision to shut down the project “does not seem to have been communicated to the UNDP-DPRK office, as equipment purchases continued throughout 2006, including some dual use items.”

That Garcia apparently did not double-check on whether this highly sensitive order was carried out until a nuclear device exploded and another U.N. sanctions resolution loomed is never discussed in the report.

But the lack of discussion speaks volumes, both about UNDP bureaucratic efficiency and about the apparent level of UNDP concern and internal discussion of Kim’s dangerous nuclear plans.

There is one prominent exception to the report’s attitude of sympathetic understanding toward UNDP lapses: the whistleblower who brought most of them to outside attention and inspired U.S. diplomats to call for multiple investigations, including the panel report.

The report concludes that the whistleblower, a former UNDP-DPRK operations manager named Artjon Shkurtaj did, in fact, perform a service when he brought the situation in the UNDP’s North Korea office to light. But the report emphatically denied there was any retaliation against Shkurtaj when a promotion he already had been given was withdrawn and other short-term contracts he held expired.

Such claims, the panel concluded, were “without merit,” as it also made attacks on Shkurtaj’s personal integrity.

At the same time, the report offers evidence that the North Korean regime was pressuring UNDP to keep Shkurtaj out of the job and reveals the alarming fact that the regime apparently had veto power over UNDP’s ability to fund the position.

For his part, Shkurtaj has declared that the authors of the report violated customary U.N. practice when they failed to show their conclusions to him prior to publication. He has appealed to the U.N. chief ethics officer, Robert Benson, to investigate.

So it may well be that the ultimate message of the report is that passing on potentially dangerous equipment to a ruthless dictator who threatened his neighbors and defied the U.N., itself apparently was regrettable but otherwise a lapse in communication. Talking about such things outside UNDP apparently was something else.

Rather than bringing “closure on the allegations against UNDP,” as the organization’s boss, Dervis, hopes, the North Korean investigative report ought to raise bigger and more urgent questions about UNDP operations around the world.

If Kim Jong Il’s despotic government was able to twist UNDP’s rules and its adherence to international law with such ease, what is going on in UNDP offices in dictatorships such as Zimbabwe and Syria?

Most urgently of all, as the U.N. wobbles toward further sanctions on the nuclear-ambitious Islamic regime in Iran, what is going on in UNDP offices in Tehran?

George Russell is executive editor of FOX News.

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June 3, 2008

The UN Food Summit is a farce. They ought to be eating what people in Burma eat if they are about “food”…

Who are we kidding? The whole UN is a farce.

World leaders tone down menu over fears of hypocrisy

Silvio Berlusconi, the Italy Prime Minister, jokes with Food and Agriculture Organisation Director General Jacques Diouf before sitting dow to lunch in Rome

Richard Owen in Rome (reporting)

World leaders attending the UN food summit in Rome settled down today to a “modest” lunch in order not to be accused of “hypocrisy” as they were at the last world food summit six years ago.

Lobster, goose and foie gras have given way to pasta, mozzarella, spinach and sweetcorn. “It does not look good if leaders discussing global starvation are seen to be dining lavishly,” an official of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said. “At the last summit in 2002 we did not give enough thought to the menu and were open – unfairly, in our view – to the charge of hypocrisy.”

At the last summit in 2002 we did not give enough thought to the menu and were open – unfairly, in our view – to the charge of hypocrisy.

[I love it: "Unfairly in our view". Oh your poor dears. The fact that you could be criticised for your fat-cat dining selection when you're a part of a global program to feed hungry people. Moving on... wow, that downgrading to pasta, mozzarella, and sweetcorn really is tightening the belt. How will they have the strength to lift their wine glasses? I guess they really ARE eating what the Burmese folks are eating.]

The summit six years ago aimed to halve the number of the world’s hungry by 2015. Like this week’s meeting, it was held amid tight security at the FAO’s palatial headquarters, housed in the former Fascist Ministry for the African Empire near the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus.

The 2002 menu, published by The Times, began with foie gras on toast with kiwi fruit and lobster in vinaigrette, followed by fillet of goose with olives and seasonal vegetables and ending with a compote of fruit with vanilla, all accompanied by an array of fine wines.

This time the catering was scaled down. Leaders first ate vol au vent stuffed with sweetcorn and mozzarella, followed by a pasta dish with a sauce of pumpkin and shrimps, and then veal meatballs and cherry tomatoes, with a fruit salad and vanilla ice-cream for dessert. The wine was a “straightforward but very acceptable Orvieto Classico”, officials said.

Tomorrow the lunch menu features cheese mousse, pasta, green beans and pineapple with ice-cream, all washed down with a Nero d’Avola Cabernet from Sicily. On Thursday, the last day of the summit, delegates will be offered courgette tart, parmesan risotto, ragout of veal with sautee potatoes, and lemon mousse for dessert with a strawberry sauce, with Pino Grigio from Trentino as the wine.

The inclusion of mozzarella is seen as a UN vote of confidence in the cheese, which is made from buffalo milk. Earlier this year buffalo farms in the Campania region were quarantined because of a scare over allegedly high levels of dioxin, the result of the Naples rubbish crisis, in which uncollected mountains of waste have turned toxic and been set on fire by desperate residents.

Tonight the food summit delegates repair for dinner to the Renaissance-era Villa Madama, in the hills overlooking Rome, which is used for government hospitality. Italian officials said, however, that neither Mr Mugabe nor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian leader, had been invited to the banquet, hosted by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister.

The FAO was founded in 1945, initially to help countries devastated by the Second World War to re-establish food supplies and later to help the newly independent countries of the Third World. It works alongside IFAD (the International Fund for Agricultural Development), which finances Third World farming projects, and the World Food Programme (WFP), which supplies emergency aid.

That 2008 menu in full:

Vol au vent avec mais et mozarelles

Pates a la creme de potiron et crevettes, Paupiettes de veau avec tomates cerises et Bailic Epinards a la romaine

Salade de fruit avec glace a la vanille

Vin: Orvieto Classico Poggio Calvelli 2005