You can just choke on the irony

Hunger talks start with lobster and foie gras

THE opening day of the UN World Food Summit, dedicated to combating global hunger, was marked yesterday by a sumptuous lunch for the 3,000 delegates served by 170 Italian waiters.

The summit leaders were offered foie gras, lobster, and goose stuffed with olives. followed by fruit compote.

The Rome lunch was a symbol, for Western leaders at least, of the extravagant and bloated bureaucracies that the aid business has created, and went some way towards explaining why so few of them were in attendance yesterday.

I can't help but wonder that many places in the world today would be better off if the UN would just...go away.

I loved this portion, too:

A stream of limousines and police outriders escorted the leaders from the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), a sprawling United Nations bureaucracy housed in the former Fascist Ministry for the African Empire near the Colosseum, to the luxury of hotels on the Via Veneto and the city’s finest restaurants.

....

They [FAO officials] acknowledge that many Third World regimes are corrupt and that maladministration and dictatorship are as much responsible for economic backwardness and malnutrition as drought and natural disasters. But the FAO’s backers say that the organisation has laudable aims and the West should help to achieve them instead of carping from the sidelines. [Emphasis mine.]

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.

If the record is mixed, it is because the West has failed to provide the "political will", and the funds, to back up their promises, Nick Parsons, the FAO spokesman, said. Of the $70 billion (£48billion) spent on development aid worldwide, just $11 billion goes on agriculture.

Rush Limbaugh often points out that these programs rely on people's perceptions of their intentions, not their actions, and here we have the backers of one such agency actually saying that. "Yes, we're ineffectual and we eat well (pass the lobster, please), but we mean well...."