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FAO Names Chinese Actress Gong Li As New Ambassador
Chinese actress Gong Li will be nominated as new ambassador of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) at the World Food Day's ceremony held next Monday, the Rome-based organization announced Wednesday.
Along with Senegalese pop star Youssou N'Dour, another newly nominated FAO ambassador, Gong Li will participate in the 2000 World Food Day Ceremony at the FAO's Rome headquarters to mark the 55th anniversary of the founding of the organization.
The FAO said that Gong Li had expressed her support on the FAO's fight against hunger in the world and would call upon the public to help poor people of the world "break out the vicious circle of chronic hunger and undernourishment."
This year's World Food Day theme, "A Millennium Free From Hunger" invokes both a vision and a challenge, the FAO said.
The vision is to live in a world where everyone has enough to eat everyday.
The challenge is to make the vision a reality. As the millennium dawns, around 800 million people are chronically hungry.
The World Food Day was first observed by the FAO in 1981 to raise public awareness of the urgent need to find a lasting solution to the worldwide problem of hunger and malnutrition. It is held annually on October 16, the date the FAO was founded in 1945 in Quebec of Canada.
Last year four persons were named as ambassadors by the FAO on the World Food Day. They were Nobel Prize winner in medicine Rita Levi Montalcini, actress Gina Lollobrigida, jazz singer Dee Dee Bridgewater and legendary South African singer Miriam Makeba.
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