New York - A total of 24 world leaders on Tuesday said they remain committed to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) aimed at tackling world poverty, but said the international community has failed to meet its goals half way to the target year of 2015. "We have made some progress. But seven years later and half way to 2015, we are not on track to meet that commitment," said a declaration on the MDGs issued by the bloc.
"We need urgent action to meet this development emergency if the world is to get back on track," the declaration said. It called for a summit in 2008 of world leaders, the private sector, civil society and faith groups to review progress made and accelerate action.
The Millennium Development Goals were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2000, setting targets in eight areas to be reached by 2015. The goals foresee halving extreme poverty and hunger, providing universal primary education, gender equality, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, ensuring environmental sustainability and developing a global partnership for development.
The declaration was published at UN headquarters during a visit of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who attended a conference on the MDGs with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
"We cannot allow our promises that became pledges to descend into just aspirations, and then wishful thinking, and then only words that symbolise broken promises," Brown said in an address to the conference.
The signers of the declaration also included President George W Bush, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission. Others include the leaders of Japan, Canada, Ghana, Brazil, Italy, France, India, Portugal, Norway and Spain.
"We did not make the commitment to the Millennium Development Goals only for us to be remembered as the generation that betrayed promises rather than honoured them and undermined trust that promises can ever be kept," Brown said. "So it is time to call it what it is: a development emergency which needs emergency action."
"If 30,000 children died needlessly and avoidably every day in America or Britain we would call it an emergency. And an emergency is what it is," he said.
