The Group of Eight leading nations called on Monday “for increasing public and private investment” in agriculture, but their communiqué after the first meeting on the subject acknowledged that efforts to tackle hunger were lagging.

G8 agriculture ministers, meeting in northern Italy, said that the world was “very far from reaching” the United Nations’ goal of halving by 2015 the world’s proportion of malnourished people, after they reviewed what they called “alarming data” on hunger.