THE snubbing of the recent United Nations Food Summit in Rome by the developed world was a sign of global apartheid that is being pursued by the developed world against their developing world counterparts.

G8 countries except the host Italy  Britain, France, America, Germany, Japan and Russia were conspicuous by their absence at the summit, which developing countries, at the mercy of global warming and climate change, hoped would thrash out some of the issues with the seriousness they deserve.

Hunger affects over one billion people worldwide, and the situation is projected to deteriorate further with dry land agriculture -- which most developing world countries rely on -- being projected to yield less and less up to the close of this century, where cereal production might be non-existent in Africa.

At the summit the first speaker, President Mugabe decried Western subsidies, climate change, inaccessibility to arable land, rising costs of farming inputs and general lack of money to finance agriculture as militating against global food security, especially in developing countries.

The West has worsened Zimbabwe's plight by imposing illegal economic sanctions in vindictiveness against the land reform programme, which benefited over 300 000 households previously marginalised by colonial land tenure.

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, called hunger "the most terrible weapon of mass destruction," and urged the developed world to meet their commitments to boost investment in agriculture in the developing world and to end "shameful" farming subsidies.

"They sabotage emerging agriculture in the poorer countries, wiping out their hope to create a bridge to development," Lula was quoted as saying.

Pope Benedict XVI, in his historic address to the summit, condemned opulence and waste (of rich nations) in a world where the numbers of hungry have multiplied despite international efforts to combat chronic hunger.

But a snobbish developed world, which has invested heavily in the military establishment, virtually viewed the issue of hunger as an otherworldly problem that they have nothing to do with.

This snobbery was no less mirrored in a story that appeared on the Internet titled "Critics say UN food summit wasteful, ineffective".

The story not only gave the impression of African leaders being on an ill-deserved holiday, but also basically saying nothing warranting the legitimate concern of good Western governments.

President Mugabe was accused of abusing the platform to attack "what he called his neo-colonialist foes" while according to the story, "Another longtime African strongman, Muammar Gadaffi, held another nightly soiree at a villa in the Italian capital in the company of hundreds of young ladies selected by a 'hostess' agency."

"Tunisia's first lady and her bodyguards blocked traffic on roads leading to Via Condotti, a glamorous street of designer boutiques near the Spanish Steps.

Rome daily Il Messaggero ran a photo of Leila Zine in front of luxury jewelry store Bulgari," it said.

It claimed that Italian news reports had "said (President) Mugabe arrived on a private plane with a delegation of more than 60 people -- most of them on the sanctions list and taking advantage of the UN summit to visit Europe."

"The images bolstered criticism that the summit called by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation is long on rhetoric and extravagance and short on solutions for the world's 1 billion hungry," the report inferred.

In fact, the same report quoted Professor John Makumbe, a rabid critic of President Mugabe in the Western anti-FAO summit chorus plus, of course, the personal attacks on President Mugabe.

Makumbe reportedly said President Mugabe "has gallivanted around the world attending UN conferences and of course enjoying the food there when a lot of his people here are scratching the bottom of the barrel."

"It is a sanctions-busting manouvre," Makumbe -- who is still to justify his professorship with rational thought -- pontificated.

"It's a shopping trip, taking advantage of the UN to actually get into Europe."

Western actions did not end with the snobbish rejection of the well-meant summit, which has been cynically dubbed as the "hunger summit" by many Western media houses.

G8 countries rejected FAO's call to commit themselves to earmark 17 percent of their foreign aid budgets for agricultural development, which UN officials estimated would cost US$44 billion yearly.

Aid dedicated to agriculture by the developed world has fallen from 19 percent in 1980 to 3.8 percent in 2006. One writer, Paul Virgo, said the situation at FAO "at best" reflected the limits of the UN and its flagship body in the fight against hunger, the Food and Agriculture Organisation.

At worst, it showed that Western leaders "lack the political will to really to put their backs into solving a problem that -- no matter how unjust and scandalous, in a world with more than enough to feed everyone -- generally does not directly affect the voters who put them into office."

Meaning that Western leaders do not care for the billion-plus people, a fifth of whom are children, who currently languish in hunger, which Western-created unfair international trading practices and climate change have worsened.

This is the face of global apartheid that the West has foisted on the world.

The destabilising effects of insecurity, as seen in the scores of countries that were involved in food riots over the past two years, which the West is in no mood to avert, underline the grave motives of the West.

Add that to the ubiquitous and pervasive Western-funded non-governmental organisations that are all too ready to "help" the countries and communities that are affected by hunger, and one gets the clear picture that Western governments use food as an instrument of war and domination and case for "false generosity".

Last year, food crises and riots gripped many parts of the world, one analyst, Sophia Tesfamariam, regretted that "doling out" food aid through humanitarian organisations "would only obscure the problems, not find lasting solutions."

"Food aid undermines local production, destroys local food systems and undermines the dignity of the people, creates markets for multinationals and undermines national interests and efforts, creates debilitating dependency, camouflages or masks systemic internal problems," she wrote.

Read in the context of the current reluctance of rich nations to commit themselves to a binding climate change deal, the recent FAO snub by rich nations amplifies the sinister agenda of Western countries, if at best it is not a case of myopia.

Rich countries, whose industrial activities over the past centuries have largely polluted the air leading to global warming and climate change, are neither ready to sign a deal that legally binds them to cut industrial emissions, nor provide money for mitigation and adaptation in poor countries.

The reason: the developing world will suffer the most from climate change, and it will not trouble many Western citizens.

Africa, especially, will suffer acute food shortages, flooding of villages and possibly the whole of the island nations, the extinction of some animal species, among other effects.

It is then, it seems, when the developed world would want to show their pseudo-love to the people of the developing world.

As matters stand, the West would rather the situation worsen to precipitate a crisis that will give the developing world away in a silver platter.

Climate change and food insecurity are the twin "weapons of mass destruction", in the words of the Brazilian leader, by today's developing world in its global apartheid war against the poor.

And they have racist media and "analyst" embeds like John Makumbe to further their interests.