UK to snub Mugabe at World Food Summit

BY OUR LONDON CORRESPONDENT

LONDON

June 3: The presence of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe at the United Nations’ global summit on rising food prices at the headquarters of Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome overshadowed the talks on the crisis.

Mr Mugabe, who is facing calls to step down from his post after elections, attended the summit in Rome despite an European Union travel ban as the summit has been organised by the United Nations. Britain, which had snubbed Mr Mugabe over EU-Africa summit in Lisbon in 2007, has again made it clear that it will again follow the same course of action. International development secretary Douglas Alexander, who is representing Britain at the summit, made it clear it was obscene that Mr Mugabe had been allowed to take part in the crisis meeting. Mr Alexander made it clear that he would neither meet Mr Mugabe nor greet him.

The foreign office, according to a report in Channel Four News, is taking steps to withdraw Mr Mugabe’s honorary knighthood. Mr Mugabe was awarded the honorary knighthood in 1994 by the government led by the then Prime Minister John Major. The foreign office only revealed that it was "reviewing" the knighthood and refused to confirm of deny the decision to strip Mr Mugabe of his honorary knighthood.

In December, Prime Minister Gordon Brown had boycotted the EU-Africa summit in Lisbon over Mr Mugabe’s participation.

Mr Brown, on Monday, at a press conference in Downing Street with his Japanese counterpart Yasuo Fukuda, revealed that the rising cost of food and oil will be at the top of the agenda at the G8 summit at Hokkaido in Japan on July 7-9. Urging developed countries and international agencies to take "immediate action" to tackle rising food costs, Mr Brown a joint article with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero, said that the high-level UN conference on food should act as the start of a "coordinated and integrated" response to the global food crisis.

In an article in Spain’s ABC newspaper, Mr Brown and Mr Zapatero wrote: "850 million children and adults around the world are today suffering from hunger, and 9,000 children under the age of five years die every day due to malnutrition-related illnesses. 100 million people may have been pushed into poverty due to the doubling of food prices over the last three years... We need to join efforts in these coming months to ensure that by the United Nations millennium development goals summit on 25 September, the international community has agreed a coordinated approach to handling this crisis.