British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Tuesday sought to build new international alliances to reduce world poverty, urging countries, businesses, and individuals to support ambitious plans to revive a stalled global development plan. “It's time to call it what it is-a development emergency which needs emergency action,” Brown said in a speech at U.N. headquarters in New York City that urged business leaders and non-governmental organizations to address failures in meeting the U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Brown said he had secured support from 12 world leaders and 20 leading businesses-including Microsoft, Google, and Wal-Mart-to back his drive toward meeting the development goals. Reaching the goals would help the international community “eradicate the great evils of our time: illiteracy, disease, poverty, environmental degradation, underdevelopment,” Brown said. A report earlier this month showed that progress toward achieving the MDGs on reducing global poverty and increasing access to childcare and education-agreed to at a U.N. summit in 2000-was poor. “We are off track on some of the goals,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said. “Some say we will not make it, I say we still can.” “A failure to meet the goals would leave current world leaders “remembered as the generation that betrayed promises rather than honored them,” Brown said.
