UNITED NATIONS (AP) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged leaders of the world's major industrialized nations to make firm pledges of action and money at their summit next week to fight the poverty that billions of people face every day, especially in Africa.
In an open letter to the leaders of the eight richest and most powerful nations, he said Wednesday that people in the developing world "have suffered disproportionately from the slowdown in the world economy, and they are also the primary victims of terror and violence."
"Even the richest and most powerful countries ... are unlikely to achieve lasting security, either in the economic or the physical sense," as long as billions remain poverty-stricken, Annan warned.
The secretary-general welcomed the decision of the Group of Eight summit to focus on Africa, the world's poorest continent, at the June 26-27 summit in Kananaskis, Canada. He thanked the summit leaders for inviting him and five African leaders to attend a daylong working session on June 27.
While progress in combating poverty depends "first and foremost" on the developing countries themselves and especially their leaders, Annan said "the best efforts of these countries to break out of the cycle of poverty, ignorance, disease, conflict and environmental degradation are likely to be insufficient unless they can count on the support of the international community."
"The peoples of the developing world would therefore be bitterly disappointed if your meeting confined itself to offering them good advice and solemn exhortation, rather than firm pledges of action in areas where your own contribution can be decisive," he said.
Annan called on the Group of Eight — the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada and Russia — to stand by their commitments at the World Trade Organization meeting in Doha, Qatar in November. At that meeting, they promised negotiations to open markets to exports from poor and developing countries, especially textiles and agricultural products.
Annan urged them to build on the financial commitments made at the recent U.N. aid financing conference in Monterrey, Mexico, and work toward the additional $50 billion a year in foreign aid that is the minimum needed to meet the goals set by the world's leaders at the U.N. Millennium Summit in September 2000.
By 2015, the leaders pledged to halve extreme poverty, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, and start to reverse the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
He also called for further debt reduction for the world's poorest countries, increased contributions to the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and new commitments to preserve the environment.
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