Jakarta – President Megawati Soekarnoputri told a United Nations summit on food and agriculture that the burden of foreign debt on poor nations restricted access to food and undermined poverty reduction efforts.

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) summit in Rome on Monday, Megawati said that efforts to achieve food security should imply an assurance of food accessibility.

Indebted poor nations cannot afford to buy food when foreign debt repayments continue to burden national budgets, according to the President.

"The absence of financial and physical access to sufficient food will only make food security part of the problem, not the solution," Megawati said in her speech at the FAO world summit, the second since 1996.

Delegates at the four-day summit are hoping to produce an action plan to halve the number of starving people by 2015. The UN estimates that around 800 million people go hungry, almost all in developing countries.

Efforts since the 1996 FAO summit to fight starvation have shown little progress despite a growth in world food supply.

Claiming to have achieved self-sufficiency in rice in 1986, Indonesia has now become one of the world's biggest rice importers.