The United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan has called on the world's wealthiest nations to stop subsidising their farmers, as a first step toward dealing with famine in Africa. He made the plea last week during a meeting at the UN headquarters of a newly formed Group of Eight Contact Group on Food Security in Africa, which was created to give a higher profile to agricultural development issues.

This is coming against a backdrop of current severe food shortages on the continent, aggravated by the AIDS epidemic, that is threatening more than 30 million people in southern and north-eastern Africa.

The Group of Eight, acording to reports, includes the Group of Seven highly industrialised nations, the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Canada, Japan, and Italy, plus Russia. Annan told the contact group as its first meeting got under way that world governments had to deal with the structural causes of a looming famine, as well as the lack of food itself.

They needed to do more to develop agriculture, improve the global marketplace for farm goods, and bolster the fight against AIDS, which is rapidly killing off farmers while creating a generation of orphans in Africa, the UN leader said.

Achieving these goals will require significant additional resources and investment, Annan said, calling on the rich nations to "recognise that agriculture is an essential pillar of development."

He continued, "But it will also require dismantling the agricultural subsidies from rich countries, which currently total more than $300 billion a year. Only then will Africa be able to achieve truly sustainable agricultural production."

Both the European Union and the United States pledged last year at trade talks in Doha, Qatar, to reduce tariffs and subsidies which hinder world commerce. But there has been no agreement yet in world trade talks on winding down farm subsidies, leaving developing countries increasingly frustrated at the difficulty of getting their agricultural goods into markets in the developed world, particularly in highly protected Europe and Japan.

At the meeting, U.S. Under-Secretary of State, Alan Larson said Washington agreed that a move toward ending farm subsidies and trade barriers "would be profoundly pro-developmental", a view that was echoed by the French Cooperation Minister Pierre-Andre Wiltzer, who claimed that President Jacques Chirac had earlier (last month) called on developed nations to observe a moratorium on subsidising farm exports destined for Africa.