Irons warns U.N. hungercrats "at risk of obesity"

ROME-- British actor Jeremy Irons took a swipe at the United Nations’ often sluggish bureaucracy during his inauguration as a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Monday, quipping also that most people attending the famine-fighting agency's latest jamboree were at risk of obesity rather than going hungry.

 “If a show was to go on as long as this in the theatre people would be booing by now,” Irons told diplomats and food agency executive packed into the FAO's plenary hall for World Food Day at its sprawling headquarters in the former Italian colonies ministry building. “I don’t know how the ladies stand it,” he added after starting to speak nearly an hour behind schedule.

 Irons said he had been mulling over the causes of world hunger. “Is it that we need more money, or do we need more effective ways … or an entirely different approach? We in this room are more likely to suffer from an excess of food – obesity,” he added.

 While the World Food Programme director Josette Sheehan underlined her agency’s achievements in Somalia, Irons asked “why did the crisis in the Horn of Africa take the world by surprise?”

 “We must improve our methods of predicting catastrophe,” he said, noting that “many pledges are not honoured,” by donor nations.

 Last year Irons starred in a promotional video for The 1 billion hunger project  – a worldwide drive to attract at least one million signatures to a petition calling on international leaders to move hunger to the top of the political agenda.