  Antiproton--proton annihilation into light mesons is revisited in the few GeV
energy domain, in view of a global description of the existing data. An
effective meson model is developed, with mesonic and baryonic degrees od
freedom in $s$, $t$, and $u$ channels. Regge factors are added to reproduce the
proper energy behavior and the forward and backward peaked behavior. A
comparison with existing data and predictions for angular distributions and
energy dependence are done for charged and neutral pion pair production.
