UN FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION"S "TELEFOOD" CONCERT AVAILABLE TO MILLIONS ONLINE

Press Release
SAG/68

UN FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION’S ‘TELEFOOD’ CONCERT AVAILABLE TO MILLIONS ONLINE

ROME, 28 December (FAO) –- The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced today that it will webcast highlights of its TeleFood '99 concert to millions worldwide exclusively via Apple's QuickTime TV (QTV), an Internet network for streaming audio and video, beginning Thursday, 30 December.

The concert brought leading Caribbean, Latin American and African musicians together on stage in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, to perform in support of the agency's campaign to raise awareness of world hunger and fund grassroots development projects in some of the poorest rural areas of the world. Concert headliners include Jamaica's Jimmy Cliff, South Africa's Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela and Brazilian Gilberto Gil, winner of this year's Grammy Award for World Music.

The FAO TeleFood webcast features two and a half hours of reggae, calypso and soca from English-speaking countries in the Caribbean, salsa and merengue from the Spanish-speaking lands and beguine and zouk from the Francophone islands, plus the sounds of Brazil and the African continent.

FAO has led worldwide efforts to eliminate the chronic hunger that now affects almost 800 million people in the developing world -- a number greater than the total populations of North America and Western Europe combined. Realizing that bringing an end to hunger must be everybody's concern, not just the responsibility of governments, the agency has pioneered new approaches, like TeleFood. The campaign uses national and global broadcasts of concerts and other events to increase people's awareness of the scope of world hunger and enlist their support for TeleFood's goal -- Food for All.

Macintosh and Windows users can view the TeleFood webcast using the QuickTime 4 Player. The QuickTime Player is available as a free download from www.apple.com/quicktime. Beginning 30 December, viewers can go to the FAO hompage, www.fao.org, or the QuickTime Showcase site, www.apple.com/quicktime/showcase, to view the webcast. Visitors to the site will be able to watch and listen to a playlist of all performers or select songs by individual artists.

Other sponsors of FAO's TeleFood event include the international food company Parmalat, and satellite operators IntelSat and PanAmSat, which carried the concert free of charge to television stations around the world. For further information from FAO or photos of the TeleFood '99 concert contact: John Riddle, FAO Media Officer; telephone: (39) 06 5705-3259; e-mail: .

* *** *