The reading from the Book of Daniel this Sunday describes a vision of "one like a Son of man." United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon opened a worldwide "Hunger Summit" on Monday in Rome by calling for a "single global vision" to address the plight of the world's estimated 1 billion hungry people. Aid groups, however, are looking for actions, not words.

The absence of many world leaders undermined the summit from the start, and its final declaration showed little progress was made in the fight against hunger, said critics.

U.N. officials put on a brave face throughout the three-day meeting, saying it had won broad support for the need to focus on longer-term agricultural development--rather than emergency aid--to help poor countries feed themselves.

"It's a half-full, half-empty glass," said Jacques Diouf, director general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), who had called the summit to keep attention high on the plight of the more than 1 billion people going hungry. "We made some progress to reverse the decline in agricultural investments . . . but it did not go as far as FAO would have wished to see," he told the final news conference.

"It's a big disappointment that the leaders from the biggest and richest countries did not come," said Gawain Kripke of the aid agency Oxfam. "Without them it's hard to imagine how the world will attack these challenges of hunger and increasing agricultural productivity," he said, adding that the summit had thrown only "crumbs" to those who do not have enough to eat.

The FAO had hoped the meeting would yield firm promises to boost farm aid to $44 billion a year, reversing nearly 30 years of neglect. Diouf also wanted leaders to commit to eradicating malnutrition by 2025. But the summit declaration merely pledged to eliminate hunger "at the earliest possible date" and set no targets nor a timeframe for more investments in agricultural development.

Hunger is local as well as global. A hard-hitting report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) this week said that more than one in seven American households struggled to put enough food on the table in 2008, the highest rate since the USDA began tracking food security levels in 1995.

That's about 49 million people, or 14.6 percent of U.S. households. The numbers are a significant increase from 2007 when 11.1 percent of U.S. households suffered from what USDA classifies as "food insecurity"--not having enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle.

The report also showed an increasing number of children in the U.S. are suffering. In 2008 16.7 million children were classified as not having enough food, 4.3 million more than in 2007. "What should really shock us is that almost one in four children in our country lives on the brink of hunger," said David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World.

Source: Articles by Silvia Aloisi and Svetlana Kovalyova for Reuters, Joe Kapua for Voice of America News, Gina Doggett for Agence France Press, and Henry C. Jackson for the Associated Press