Rome, Sep 17 (DPA) Athletics legend Carl Lewis, Indonesian popstar Anggun, the Dominican Republic’s first-lady Margarita Cedeno de Fernandez, French fashion designer Pierre Cardin, and Colombian singer Fanny Lu have been named by the UN food agency as goodwill ambassadors.
The Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is set to award the titles at a World Food Day ceremony Oct 16 in the Italian capital, FAO said Thursday.

Singer-songwriter Anggun, one of the first Asian artists to have broken on to the international music scene with her hit album Snow on the Sahara has campaigned for a wide range of social and environmental causes, FAO said.

Cedeno de Fernández, wife of Dominican Republic President Leonel Antonio Fernandez Reyna is being presented with the title of Extraordinary Ambassador in recognition of the “numerous social development projects in food and agriculture she has undertaken in her own country and in particular those benefiting women”, FAO said.

Cardin, who FAO described as one of the world’s top stylists for both women and men, has initiated “a large number of humanitarian projects and public campaigns notably for the victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster”.

Colombian singer Fanny Lu whose music has topped charts in Latin America for the past three years, has been active in promoting World Food Day and the FAO TeleFood campaign to fund micro-projects around the globe, the UN agency said.

This year’s World Food Day theme, “achieving food security in times of crisis”, highlights the critical plight of 1.02 billion people who are currently malnourished and the increasingly critical need in the current depressed economic climate to assist the hungry, FAO said.