‘Asia richer but still leads world in poverty'UNITED NATIONS – Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon opened a summit Monday with a plea to the assembled presidents, prime ministers and kings to use their power to meet UN goals to help the world's poorest by 2015. “The clock is ticking, there is much more to do,” Ban said at the start of the three-day summit at the UN headquarters in New York. He acknowledged the delays and shortfalls that have beset the eight major goals set at the Millennium summit 10 years ago but said that despite the economic and financial crisis the world has a duty to lift billions of people in Africa and Asia out of the “dehumanizing condition of extreme poverty.” “Recovery from the economic crisis should not mean a return to the flawed and unjust past,” he told the summit. The summit in 2000 set eight major development goals to be achieved by 2015, which include cutting the number of people living on less than one dollar a day by half. Ten years after world leaders set the most ambitious goals ever to tackle global poverty, they are gathered again to spur action to meet the deadline – which the UN says will be difficult, if not impossible, in some cases. General Assembly President Joseph Deiss opened the summit saying: “We must achieve the Millennium Development Goals. We want to achieve them. And we can achieve them.” Asia has slashed the number of people living in extreme poverty, but leads the world in malnourishment and is struggling to meet ambitious development goals set at the United Nations, a UN report said. “One of the region's greatest MDG successes has been a reduction in the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day from 1.5 billion to 947 million between 1990 and 2005,” the UN report on Asia's progress in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) said. “However, the region remains home to two-thirds of the world's poor and hungry, with one in six malnourished, and it has been slow to reduce child mortality and to improve maternal health.” The report was issued at the summit attended by more than 140 heads of state or government at UN headquarters in New York five years before the MDG deadline of 2015. The mixed report on Asia reflected the disparity in a region that ranges from the surging economies of China and India to tiny and fragile Pacific Island nations, and features both futuristic new airports and shanty towns.
