As world leaders gather to discuss short and long-term solutions to the world food crisis at the FAO summit in Rome, a growing number of critics are blaming the dysfunctions of the world food market on international organisations.

Leading the pack is Senegal President Abdoulaye Wade who told AFP earlier this year that “we should get rid of the FAO and transfer its funds and responsibilities to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).”

He accused the FAO of using 20% from each of its projects to pay for its fees.

In November 2007, a report by an international commission of experts pointed to the lapses of the FAO, calling the organisation excessively bureaucratic and lacking global strategy, vision, and ambitious projects.

Abou Diouf, President Wade’s countryman and head of the FAO, rose to the defense of his organisation in an interview with French business daily Les Echos on Tuesday.

“Since 1994, the FAO budget has been cut by 30% and my personnel by 24.7%,” he said.

On the food safety topic, says Diouf, “what many forget is that the FAO is not the only one in charge. The FAO doesn’t decide the funding; it’s the role of the World Bank and other regional banks."

These banks have cut from 17 to 3% their share of aid to development going to agriculture, he added.

The responsibility of the IMF and of the World Bank is something NGOs participating in an alternative summit in Rome hardly need to be convinced of. For them, international institutions are guilty of forcing the liberalization of trade onto fragile economies.
 
"These very policies have flooded our countries with cheap food, undermined our food sovereignty and devastated our ability to produce food for ourselves,"  Alvaro Santin, representing the Movement of Landless Brazilians told AFP.

Calling for the end of the FAO will help solve the current crisis, Catherine Godard, head of advocacy for the French-based NGO Catholic Committee against Hunger and for Development (CCFD) told France 24. But, she acknowledged, “the FAO is weak when up against the IMF or the World Bank and it is undermined by the contradictions between its member countries.”

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon came to the rescue of the embattled organisation by stressing the political dimension of the current crisis. In a speech at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) on the eve of the summit, he denounced governments, which “put off hard decisions and overlooked the need to invest in agriculture."