Africa took center stage at the G8 summit on Friday, with rich nations eager to show they will honor past aid pledges and approve a $15 billion farming program to help poor nations feed themselves.

After two days of talks focused on the economic crisis, trade and global warming, the final day of the meeting in Italy looked at problems facing the poorest nations, with a U.S.-led focus on aid for farmers rather than emergency food supplies.

The United Nations says the number of malnourished people has risen over the past two years and is expected to top 1.02 billion this year, reversing a four-decade trend of declines.

“Food aid is necessary because we have people suffering from drought, from flood, from conflicts and what they want is immediate food to eat,” Jacques Diouf, head of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, said at the L’Aquila summit.

“But if we have to feed 1 billion hungry people, we have to help them produce their own food,” he told Reuters

The G8 was expected to pledge $15 billion over three years for agriculture in poor countries to improve food insecurity.

G8 leaders promised in Gleneagles in 2005 to increase annual aid by $50 billion by 2010, half of which was meant for African countries. But aid bodies say some G8 countries have gone back on their word, especially this year’s G8 host, Italy.

African leaders said they would voice their concerns, with Ethiopian premier Meles Zenawi telling Reuters: “The key message for us is to ask the G8 to live up to their commitments.”

LIFE AND DEATH DECISIONS

Besides Meles, the leaders of Algeria, Angola, Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa joined their G8 counterparts to discuss food security and farming, and to push their demand for compensation for the ravages of climate change.

It was not clear how much of the $15 billion was new funding and how much each country would give. The United States, Japan and European Union were expected to contribute $3 billion each.

The focus on agricultural investments reflects a U.S.-led shift away from emergency aid assistance toward longer-term strategies to try to make communities more self-sufficient.

Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade told Reuters that Barack Obama, who will make his first visit to Africa as U.S. president after the G8, brought a welcome new focus on African farming.

Wade, who has championed efforts to increase agriculture in his West African country, which relies heavily on food imports, said Obama “really has the will to focus on food in Africa.”

“The United States produces maize and some crops and sends it to people in famine, but the new conception is to produce these crops in Africa and not in the United States,” Wade said.

But the $15 billion compares unfavorably with $13.4 billion which the G8 says it disbursed between January 2008 and July 2009 for global food security.

British charity ActionAid has warned that, with one billion hungry, decisions at the G8 could “literally make the difference between life and death for millions in the developing world.”

Japan and the European Union were championing a code of conduct for responsible investment in the face of growing farmland acquisition or “land grabs” in emerging nations.

SUMMIT FRUSTRATION

The l’Aquila summit has produced checkered results on other issues, making only limited progress in crucial climate talks following the refusal by major developing nations to sign up to the goal of halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

“There is a bit of frustration because one would like to convince everyone about everything and obtain all the results straight way, but things are progressing,” French President Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters late on Thursday.

G8 leaders said the global financial crisis still posed serious risks to the world economy, further stimulus packages for growth might still be required and that it was dangerous to implement “exit strategies” from emergency measures too early.

“Reaching the bottom of the slump is not when you start with exit strategies. We need to choose a point where we’ve already got some way out of the trough,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Friday.

She dismissed a Chinese proposal, aired at the summit, for debate on seeking an alternative global reserve currency to the dollar in the long term as something that was not of “practical relevance” for the time being.

The summit wraps up at lunch-time to be followed by a flurry of bilateral meetings that stretch long into the day. Obama will hold a meeting with Pope Benedict, who this week called for a re-think of the way the world economy is run.

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(Additional reporting by Matthew Tostevin; Writing by Stephen Brown and Crispian Balmer; editing by Ralph Boulton and Janet McBride) – Reuters