Officials Say Rising Food, Energy Prices Are Threat to UN's Goals for Cutting World Poverty.
Pricey food, high oil costs and grim projections of damage from global warming are the biggest challenges to meeting the United Nations' 2015 deadline for reducing poverty around the globe, officials said Monday.
After a meeting on the world body's eight Millennium Development Goals, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, world financial officials and African and European leaders told reporters that sub-Saharan Africa is the region most off-track from achieving the poverty goals.
One of the goals -- reducing the number of women who die giving birth by three-fourths -- will not be achieved in Africa unless nations contribute significantly more money for better medical care, Ban told reporters.
"The facts on the ground in Africa speak very clearly," he said. "With the exception of maternal mortality, each individual (goal) will be reached in several African countries." He cited modest progress in Malawi toward cutting child mortality rates and in Senegal toward providing better quality water and sanitation.
Ban said he and General Assembly President Srgjan Kerim will hold a high-level meeting Sept. 25 seeking to spur progress toward the goals, which were adopted at the U.N. Millennium Summit in 2000 and endorsed by virtually every nation.
They represent commitments by all countries to cut, by 2015, the number of people living on a dollar a day by half, ensure all children have an elementary school education, start reversing the AIDS pandemic and improve health care, gender equality, access to clean water and environmental degradation.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick told The Associated Press that during the meeting he emphasized the need to cut carbon emissions blamed for warming the planet and to look at rising energy and food prices that make it harder to lift people out of poverty.
Some oil and gas producing nations in Africa like Nigeria and Angola are benefiting from higher energy prices, Zoellick said, while other African nations that are more reliant on imports are "particularly hard hit by both high energy and high food prices."
Pricey food, high oil costs and grim projections of damage from global warming are the biggest challenges to meeting the United Nations' 2015 deadline for reducing poverty around the globe, officials said Monday.
After a meeting on the world body's eight Millennium Development Goals, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, world financial officials and African and European leaders told reporters that sub-Saharan Africa is the region most off-track from achieving the poverty goals.
One of the goals -- reducing the number of women who die giving birth by three-fourths -- will not be achieved in Africa unless nations contribute significantly more money for better medical care, Ban told reporters.
"The facts on the ground in Africa speak very clearly," he said. "With the exception of maternal mortality, each individual (goal) will be reached in several African countries." He cited modest progress in Malawi toward cutting child mortality rates and in Senegal toward providing better quality water and sanitation.
Ban said he and General Assembly President Srgjan Kerim will hold a high-level meeting Sept. 25 seeking to spur progress toward the goals, which were adopted at the U.N. Millennium Summit in 2000 and endorsed by virtually every nation.
They represent commitments by all countries to cut, by 2015, the number of people living on a dollar a day by half, ensure all children have an elementary school education, start reversing the AIDS pandemic and improve health care, gender equality, access to clean water and environmental degradation.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick told The Associated Press that during the meeting he emphasized the need to cut carbon emissions blamed for warming the planet and to look at rising energy and food prices that make it harder to lift people out of poverty.
Some oil and gas producing nations in Africa like Nigeria and Angola are benefiting from higher energy prices, Zoellick said, while other African nations that are more reliant on imports are "particularly hard hit by both high energy and high food prices."
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