UN: Asia leads in reducing poverty, falters elsewhere
UN: Asia leads in reducing poverty, falters elsewhere
Paris Lord, Agence France-Presse/Bangkok
Asia leads the world in meeting a key development goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015 but has fallen well short in other areas including education, HIV/AIDS and child mortality, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
The largest continent has recorded a dramatic reduction in poverty, with 703 million Asians living on less than a dollar a day in 2001 compared with 936 million in 1990, according to the UN.
Economic growth in the world's most populous countries, China and India, helped reduce the number of people in extreme poverty.
But that contrasts with regional setbacks in some of the UN's seven other Millennium Development Goals, including lagging school enrollments, widening gender gaps and little or no improvement in reducing child mortality.
While income levels in the region increased substantially, "the other qualitative side, education, safe drinking water, sanitation and other social indicators do not necessarily go along with the poverty line," said the UN's regional chief, Kim Hak-su, who is executive secretary of the UN's Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP).
To mark the Asian release of the Millennium Development Goals Report 2005, Kim said the region had high levels of slum dwellers and people living with HIV/AIDS.
The regional picture of the fourth UN goal, reducing child mortality, was "not good", Kim said, as the report showed 10,000 children died in southern Asia daily because of poverty and malnourishment.
"Countries that have experienced conflict, including Cambodia and Iraq, have seen sharp increases or no improvement in child mortality since 1990," the 44-page report said.
"Countries reeling from AIDS, especially in southern Africa, have also seen sudden rises in under-five mortality," it added.
It was a similar picture for the UN's fifth goal of raising levels of maternal health, Kim said. "More than 500,000 women die each year during pregnancy or child birth," he said.
"Progress in reducing maternal deaths is not occurring in the countries where giving birth is most risky.
Improvements were recorded in East and Southeast Asia, "but southern Asia has the lowest level of professional care at birth in the world," Kim said. "It's alarming."
The development goals were set by 189 UN member countries in 2000 as part of the UN's "millennium declaration", with 2015 the target to achieve the goals and using 1990 as the base line.
World leaders will meet at the UN in New York in September to assess how far their pledges have been fulfilled five years on, and decide on what further steps are needed, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said in the report's foreword.
"In many ways, the task this year will be much harder than it was in 2000," Annan said. "Instead of setting targets, this time leaders must decide how to achieve them."
Annan warned that if current trends persisted, there was a risk many of the poorest countries will not be able to meet many of the goals.
"Considering how far we have come, such a failure would mark a tragically missed opportunity," Annan said.