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.