MDGs overshadowed by UN reform issues: envoy
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2005-07-22 11:35

A UN envoy warned Friday that members of the world body are too preoccupied with reform issues that makes attainment of the millennium development goals (MDGs) set in 2000 less significant prior to the 60th UN General Assembly this September.

"It appears that UN reform issues are more interesting than thinking about the poor," said Erna Witoelar, the UN special ambassador for the MDGs in Asia and the Pacific.

Since the world leaders pledged to meet all the MDGs by 2015, " Africa has remained the world's largest pocket of poverty that needs many countries to gang up on this," the Indonesia-born envoy told a press conference here.

Besides, Asia and the Pacific remain a home to 57 percent of 1. 3 billion people living in poverty in the world today, she said.

She said ministers in the region are expected to meet in Jakarta early in August to push for the MDGs and make a recommendation to the UN General Assembly.

Initiated at the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, the MDGs spell out world leaders' pledge to reduce by half the number of people living on less than a dollar per day, reduce the proportion of people suffering from hunger, ensure full course of primary education among children, eliminate gender disparity in education, reduce by two thirds the mortality rate among children, reduce by two quarters the maternal mortality ratio, halt and reverse major diseases and ensure environmental sustainability.

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