Nairobi — UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the world's wealthiest nations on yesterday to stop subsidizing their farmers as a first step toward dealing with famine in Africa.

The plea came during a meeting at United Nations headquarters of a newly formed Group of Eight Contact Group on Food Security in Africa, created to give a higher profile to agricultural development issues as severe food shortages, aggravated by the Aids epidemic, threaten more than 30 million people in southern and northeastern Africa.

The Group of Eight includes the Group of Seven highly industrialized 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. -Reuters