The building is white, and marble clad. The kind of utilitarian monolith which was created from the egos of Italian Fascists and would not have looked out of place in the set of Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil.
Last week it hosted a major international summit tussling with the major twenty-first century totems of food security, climate change and bio-energy. To say it was a bun fight is something of an understatement. There was in excess of a thousand journalists, and their technicians from every corner of the world. They were outnumbered by the delegates by about three to one.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon tells delegates the world needs to produce 50% more food by 2030 to avoid starvation. ©FAO/Giulio Napolitano
As a journalist this is a strange type of story to cover. The proceedings of the conference were streamed online, headphones connected to a receiver connected to a radio loop were provided. There were sound feeds, provided to record, and there was an internal picture feed provided by the conference organisers.
What there wasn’t, was any kind of easy access to delegates. There was a red carpeted walkway between two parts of the building along which delegates, and various dignitaries, of varying degrees of importance walked amongst us. The really important ones were shielded from the prying questions of the assembled hacks by a mixture of suits wearing a badge saying `security’ and different Italian police persons, who ushered the fourth estate out of the way with a wave of their arms. It was all rather futile, and achieved very little.
One gaggle of protestors did evade this layer of impermiability. A group of European small farmers held up paper placards drawn with a marker pen, drawing attention to the massive role of big agribusinesses in the demise of the small farmer, and the increase in world hunger…. Although the content of the message wasn’t immediately clear, it looked quite powerful with them standing silently in line holding up about six placards.
Rather conveniently for this hot and bothered hack, several of the suited securitaté chose a moment when the rolling microphones, and the nearby cameras were well within range, to snatch the placards away, and assertively bundle these quite peaceful and innocent looking farmers away. Again little achieved by the organisers, but some good radio and television footage.
And the conference itself. Well it raised a lot of issues, and there was much talk of something being needed to be done, and there was money announced, I think I recall the figure of £1.2 somewhere in the welter of communiqués and press notices, and all the talk of a new approach, and impeding crisis and conference dinner discussion. In short the issue hit the news agenda for all of two days, and nobody could agree on whether bio-fuels were the curse of the starving classes. The message at the end was a call for greater investment in agriculture, and it seems that the penny has dropped that this doesn't mean simply sending lots of bags of grain to Africa, but investing in the technolgy to enable Africa, and lots of other places to grow more food.
Will anybody’s life actually be saved by the deliberations here? I suspect not. What will probably happen is that business opportunities will present themselves, and a sort of equilibrium will emerge in years to come, where the developed world will realise that if it doesn’t do something to help the developing world, the consequent problems will overwhelm those of us who have a nice comfortable life-style untroubled by hunger. If in a decade's time there are still two hundred and eighty five million people living in hunger in the world, and no more that can be judged as a small measure of sucess of a kind.
And the elephant in the living room, is actually a pair of nellies… One of them is genetically modified, and the other is sitting there pointing its big fat trunk at the ever increasing population we have to feed. This summit conference was the opportunity for the enthusiastic supporters of GM technology to advocate it as the magic bullet which will feed the world’s poor, where as most of the European Politician tread the rather more careful line that it is one of the technologies, which in the fullness of time, may possibly be one of the weapons in the armoury. As far as controlling the ever increasing population in the world is concerned, the Vatican Secretary of State, delivering a message from The Holy Father, was strangely silent on that one.
The other rather inconvenient truth which did get some coverage, although it makes much of the farming industry in the developed world feel rather uncomfortable, is that there is actually plenty of food to go around, if we stopped eating meat, and distributed the cereals we grow evenly amongst those who need to eat them.
And did the members of the press, who had trooped out to the eternal city in oppressive temperatures through countless cordons, and checkpoints, actually get to ask any awkward questions of those with the power to make any decisions?
To do that you had to catch the eye of the official controlling a very tightly controlled press conference almost barely audable in a packed room with insufficient time to scrutinise the decision makers. There was little opportunity to actually talk to the delegates. Different coloured ID badges made sure that delegates were untroubled by pesky hacks.
I had a nice pizza in the Trastevere, and I got very hot and bothered in a city which is dysfunctional at the best of times. However under the security closures of roads, metro stations, and tramlines, surrounding a major international conference, it borders on being a complete basket case.
So did the summit conference actually achieve anything, for the people that matter? It’s difficult to see what decisions could have been made in this environment, other than by contact between the different delegates, in non-smoke filled rooms, away from the prying eyes of the press. If there is sufficient food in the places in which it is needed to feed the people who need to eat it in five years time, then the answer is yes…. Breath will be held.
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