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Focus on world's poor at General Assembly
Leaders from developing nations took the speaker's platform on the second day of the annual U.N. General Assembly debate to criticize rich countries for not doing enough to ease the plight of the world's poorest people, the Associated Press reported.
Speakers from Africa, Asia and Latin America said they were encouraged by a document adopted at a three-day summit renewing commitments to alleviate poverty, but said they would withhold final judgment until rich nations make good on their vows. "We hope that the commitments we have undertaken will not remain mere empty words," said Zambia's President Levy Mwanawasa. While the focus of the summit that ended Friday was largely on efforts to overhaul the U.N. management and human rights machinery, the original thrust of the event was to take stock of progress made toward achieving a series of goals set in 2000: To cut poverty by half, ensure universal primary education and stem the AIDS pandemic, all by 2015. Leaders of poor nations made clear that they were not impressed with the progress made so far. A week ago, a U.N. report said that about 40 percent of the world's people still struggle to survive on less than $2 a day. Jamaica's Prime Minister P.J. Patterson, speaking on behalf of the Group of 77 developing countries, repeated what has been largely acknowledged by many U.N. and outside officials: the world is nowhere close to meeting the development goals. "At the current pace, some regions and countries will
miss several of the (goals) by decades," Patterson said. "In certain areas, such
as the elimination of hunger, we would be centuries away."
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