The UN/G8 Summit: The United Nations yesterday warned the EU and the US not to let tensions over the war in Iraq push the global war on poverty off the agenda of this weekend's summit of G8 leaders in Evian.
With more than a billion people struggling to survive on less than one US dollar a day, the UN urged the G8 nations to use the meeting to kick-start deadlocked global trade talks and double aid spending.
"This summit has to be about more than Iraq," said Mr Mark Malloch Brown, the head of the UN's development programme. There had to be "serious commitment" from G8 leaders to finding a mechanism to increase aid spending.
Nearly 800 million people, 15 per cent of the world's population, suffer from chronic hunger, according to a UN report released ahead of the meeting. On current trends, south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will fail to meet the target of halving the proportion of their population in hunger by 2015.
Rapid economic growth in China has lifted 150 million out of poverty over the past decade, and the UN believes the overall target of halving the share of the world's population living on less than $1 a day will now be met by 2015.
But while progress has been rapid in countries like India, where living standards have risen by 4 per cent a year over the past decade, much of sub-Saharan Africa has gone backwards.
The report shows that 54 countries, most of them African, entered the new millennium poorer than they were at the start of the 1990s. A child in Africa has only a one-in-three chance of finishing primary school, while an African woman is 100 times more likely to die in childbirth than a woman in the West.
With enough political will in Western capitals, the UN argues, Africa and south Asia could be pushed back on track.
"World leaders cannot stand by and let the poverty that entraps more than one billion people grow more entrenched," said Mr Malloch Brown.
The UN and the World Bank have backed a call by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer for rich countries to double spending to $100 billion a year by issuing bonds backed by future aid budgets. While France, the summit host, has strongly endorsed the plan, Mr Brown has yet to win backing from other G8 members.
With the EU and the US trading blows this week over whose aid and trade policies are best for Africa, the chances of leaders uniting around the fight on poverty seem slim.
Last week President Bush accused the EU of worsening hunger in sub-Saharan Africa by encouraging starving countries to refuse GM food aid.
Mr Malloch Brown said both sides were "grandstanding" rather than dealing with the real damage their lavish agricultural subsidies inflicted on farmers in the developing world. Disagreements over farm subsidies have stalled progress in the new round of trade talks which rich countries promised would benefit the developing world.
"There needs to be a clear message from G8 leaders to their trade ministers on action on agricultural subsidies at their broadest level," said Mr Malloch Brown. "If poor countries are to win the fight against poverty, it is vital that rich countries deliver on their own pledges to remove unfair trade barriers."
The UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, has written to the leaders saying the summit should give "due priority to the issues of poverty and development, which are of overriding importance for the great majority of the world's people". - (Guardian Service)