World leaders will be condemning millions of children to death or permanent handicap from malnutrition unless they radically alter their policies and priorities for dealing with famine ridden countries, a leading medical charity has warned.

Médecins Sans Frontières made the attack ahead of this month’s world food summit in Rome.

Daniel Berman, chairman of the charity’s campaign on access to essential medicines, said that rich nations were about to make a “colossal mistake” by investing in long term agriculture programmes at the expense of urgent measures to target food aid at the hungriest children.

He warned that recent policy statements emerging from the G8 and G20 summits indicated that flawed …