World's farmers by-passed at UN food crisis summit: IFAP

The world's farmers were bypassed at this week's Rome UN food summit, reflecting a crucial gap in addressing the crisis at its most basic level, the leader of a global farmers' group said Friday.
"It's a reflection of how disconnected and dis-linked our multilateral agencies are, from the situation on the ground," Ajay Vashee, the freshly- elected head of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP) told AFP at the close of the 38th World Farmers' Congress in Warsaw, Poland.
"The people who have the ability to actually do something about this crisis were precluded," Vashee said, adding it was a recipe for "confusion and chaos." Uniting 600 million independent family farmers in 115 organisations from 80 countries around the globe, IFAP is the world's largest farmers' organisation. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) crisis summit which ended Thursday in Rome pledged 6.5 billion dollars (4.1 billion euros) in emergency food relief and vowed to halve global hunger by 2015 by taking "urgent" action over the global food crisis.