Brown: Urgent Action On Poverty Reduction Goals

UNITED NATIONS July 31st: Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Tuesday called for a new humanitarian alliance to help meet key world poverty reduction targets, evoking a "coalition for justice" in the spirit of the US Peace Corps. In an address to the United Nations in New York, Brown said change was needed to help fulfill the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), progress on which is behind schedule eight years before they are due to be completed.

As he made his keynote foreign policy speech, Brown also expressed confidence that a new draft UN resolution on Darfur for the immediate deployment of a peacekeeping forces would be adopted later Tuesday. "Today is an important decision day for Darfur, and for change," he said in his address after a breakfast meeting with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, calling the war and famine that have rocked Darfur since 2003 "the greatest humanitarian disaster the world faces today."

On the issue of the poverty reduction goals, the prime minister said that although it was a "remarkable moment" when countries signed up to them in 2000, the pace of change is now too slow and the world was "a million miles away from success." He called for governments, big business, scientists, engineers and the medical profession to join forces in a globalised "force for justice" with faith groups and non-governmental organisations. "The greatest of challenges now demands the boldest of initiatives," he told an audience of ambassadors and senior diplomats. "I want to summon into existence the greatest coalition of conscience in pursuit of the greatest of causes," he said. "In 1960 here in America, President John F. Kennedy called for a peace corps -- an international commitment to harness the idealism many felt in the face of threats to human progress and world peace," he added. "Today we should evoke the same spirit to forge a coalition for justice. And when conscience is joined to conscience, moral force to moral force ... think how much our power to do good can achieve."

Downing Street office said 12 world leaders, including France, Japan, Germany, Spain, India and Brazil, had signed a joint pledge for "urgent action" to help meet what Brown described as a "development emergency" in the world. In addition, some 20 companies and individuals involved in big business had made a similar pledge to mobilise joint efforts to cutting poverty and hunger, boosting education and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases. Brown's speech comes after he reaffirmed support for Washington on tackling global extremism on Monday after two days of private talks with US President George W. Bush at his Camp David retreat in Maryland. His US trip can be seen as an attempt to set out his foreign policy in concrete terms, combining belief in the "hard" power of military might where necessary with "soft" power aid and economic development -- or as he called it Tuesday "people power."

Brown, who as finance minister in 2006 announced at least 15 billion dollars in British funding for education in Africa over the next decade, has already talked with rock star activist Bono in the last month. With fellow rocker Bob Geldof, the U2 frontman helped push global poverty up the agenda at the G8 summit of leading industrial nations that Brown's predecessor Tony Blair chaired at Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005. Former US president Bill Clinton also dropped by at Brown's upmarket Manhattan hotel Monday night for talks. His charitable foundation is working in similar areas of the MDGs. Brown said there should be a meeting next year to report on current progress on the MDGs and discuss the way ahead.
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