[Bob Geldof] gives UN summit 4 out of 10 on poverty

From the Guardian

Ewen MacAskill in New York and Larry Elliot
The Guardian

Bob Geldof, champion of the Make Poverty History campaign, yesterday expressed disappointment with the failure of the United Nations summit to make progress on poverty reduction, giving it marks of only four out of 10.
His comments came at a joint press conference with Tony Blair organised by Downing Street to counter growing gloom over the summit.

Mr Geldof marked the Group of Eight summit at Gleneagles in July as 10 out of 10 for progress on aid, but he said: "This summit, if we are going to use the top 10 charts, I'm not thrilled ... four out of 10."

Mr Geldof said the summit had been hijacked by countries with other agendas. "On Africa we saw very disappointing language on trade; in fact, we saw a clawback (from Gleneagles)."
Mr Blair urged people to look instead towards the meeting of the International Monetary Fund next week and the World Trade Organisation in Hong Kong in December. "What we did at Gleneagles was enter into a series of commitments," he said. "These commitments have been safeguarded at the UN summit but we all want to go further."

A UK government source, speaking in private, said: "It would have been better had this week's summit not taken place. We have gone backwards since Gleneagles, not forwards."

However, Hilary Benn, the international development minister, issued a statement criticising those who had "written off the UN summit as a failure".

He said: "This summit has helped to make 2005 an extraordinary year for development and significant progress has been made in the last 24 hours to reach agreement on issues of huge importance."

Before flying home, Mr Blair was planning to speak at an alternative summit being hosted by Bill Clinton at the Sheraton in New York. Mr Blair joined Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, Olusegun Obasan, the Nigerian president, and about 40 other leaders to make the short trip from the UN summit.