DAKAR, Senegal (AP) – African leaders urged the world’s richest countries yesterday to offer greater access to their markets and insisted agriculture should remain high on the agenda to eradicate hunger and poverty.

“The world will soon have to feed more than nine billion human beings, and I am convinced that together we can take up the challenge,” Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade said at the opening of a two-day international forum in Dakar on the world agricultural trends.

French President Chirac, who attended the opening before heading to Republic of Congo, strongly defended European agricultural policy, saying the EU was “not an enemy of agriculture in developing nations”.

The two-day conference – convened by Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade – will discuss the agricultural gap between rich and poor nations.

Hundreds of agricultural experts and six heads of states – from Mali, Nigeria, Niger, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and France – are attending along with representatives from Britain and Morocco.

Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo insisted on the need to make agriculture a priority for developing nations, while urging industrialised countries to “open up more their markets”.

Chirac also touched on the world cotton trade, saying “current practices are deeply traumatising and unfair for African cotton producers.”

African cotton producers have often blamed rich countries’ domestic agricultural subsidies for pricing their crops out of world markets.

Agriculture, everything from peanuts to cocoa, is the mainstay of many African economies.