UN summit promises the world, but can it deliver? focus 09/24/2010

UN summit promises the world, but can it deliver?

focus

09/24/2010
UNITED NATIONS — After a UN poverty summit featuring 140 world leaders, three days of speeches, and thousands of news articles, critics had only one thing left to add: cold water.

No sooner had President Barack Obama urged fresh energy in the campaign to haul the planet’s so-called “bottom billion” out of extreme poverty by 2015, than aid groups demanded a reality check.

“In the time that President Obama stood at the podium to deliver his UN address, 30 women died in childbirth, and 66 children will have died from malaria,” Ray Offenheiser, spokesman with the charity Oxfam, said.

“Those numbers will repeat every hour upon hour until the President’s words are turned into action.”

The eight Millennium Development Goals, launched in 2000, are an unprecedented attempt at global cooperation to slash child mortality rates, the number of people living on less than a dollar a day, AIDS, and other aspects of extreme hardship.

But with only five years to go until the deadline, the 140 heads of state and government at the UN summit in New York admitted they need to play catch-up..... MORE

Source:  The Daily Tribune

URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100924com6.html